The results are outstanding!  This past fall, Rainbow Mountain Children’s School students, third through eighth grade, took the Stanford Achievement Test, or SAT10.  Compared nationally, Rainbow students score, on the average, in the 94th percentile in Reading, the 84th percentile in Language Arts, and the 90th percentile in Math by the eighth grade.

There are several remarkable things about the scores.  First, that the average is so high.  Such a large number of students score in the 95% and above (many are at a post-high school level) that the overall score is extremely high.  More importantly, no students score low enough to pull the average down.  This can be attributed to the small classroom size that affords every student the attention they need to be successful and to the research-based and innovative methods Rainbow teachers use.  Second, the students’ test scores steadily increase from the third grade through eighth grade.  Although the chart isn’t a straight line, the general trend in all three subjects is to be well above average in the third grade, while steadily rising through the middle school years.  This data trend speaks to the academic foundation Rainbow provides students in the primary years (focusing on imagination, concrete/hands-on learning, broad content, creativity, and multiple intelligences) and to the increased academic rigor in the older grades.

Rainbow Mountain is a holistic school that assesses students using a wide variety of methods. Standardized testing is only one strategy among many others, such as project work, research, oral response, and more. Rainbow teachers do not, in any way, teach to the test or prepare students for the particular SAT10.  Rainbow administers standardized testing in the fall, so that teachers, parents, and students can better understand their academic skills and goals for the year.  Also, since Rainbow students don’t receive traditional classroom grades prior to seventh grade, the experience with conventional testing is valuable in preparing students for high school.

Finally, Rainbow Mountain always looks at the whole child.  Yes, we are thrilled that our students excel academically, but that is only one piece. Ultimately, true success in life comes from living peacefully, working hard, being creative and resourceful, acting on compassion, and having integrity.

Spontaneous excitement about learning occurs frequently at Rainbow Mountain. Recently, a preschool teacher sharpened some snazzy pencils, slipped sparkly gel grips on them, and set them out in a basket. Two children discovered them immediately and asked what they were for. “These are for practicing writing letters and words,” the teacher said. “Where can we get words?” asked an excited child. “Look around the room. We have words hiding all around us,” came the reply. The children immediately began to look and discovered words everywhere. The teacher supplied clipboards and showed the students how to hold and use them. Soon, with great excitement, they were moving around the classroom, diligently copying as many words as they could find and returning to ask what they said. Other children noticed and asked for their own clipboards. A ready supply of clipboards and snazzy pencils are now on the teacher’s desk.

Parents at Rainbow Mountain believe in modeling service to the community for their children. Last week, the American Red Cross Bloodmobile visited the campus so that several dozen parents could donate blood for the busy holiday travel season.

As part of their Appalachian thematic unit, Rainbow Mountain’s third and fourth grade students recently enjoyed Fall Festival 2009 at the Arthur Morgan School in Burnsville. Seventh, eighth and ninth graders from Arthur Morgan School planned and coordinated all the events. Over the course of three hours on a gorgeous fall day, each Rainbow child had the opportunity to press cider, dig for potatoes, take a hay ride, paint a mural, taste goat cheeses, and try their hand at blacksmithing; learning first hand how people lived in our beautiful part of the world.

As part of their Lewis and Clark thematic unit, fifth and sixth-grade students at Rainbow Mountain recently enjoyed a three-day camping trip at Pilot Mountain State Park, near Greensboro. After pitching tents, their days were packed with exploratory hikes, journaling and whittling activities, playing Native American games, and sharing songs and stories around the campfire. A five-mile canoe trip on the Dan River was the highlight for students, teachers and parent volunteers alike.

As parents we assume – by default – the role of teacher; whether we’re predisposed to it, or not. And most of us might agree that if we were only able to pass on one life-lesson to our children, just one, that it might very well be to teachthemto think for themselves. Daily, in subtle (and not so subtle) ways, we have – for generations – done our best to reinforce the idea. Don’t worry about what everyone else is doing, if they jumped off a cliff would you? Or, conversely, maybe we take a more hands-on approach and model the behaviour ourselves (doing our own research prior to a doctor’s visit or opting for a short-cut vs. the main-road).

And, of course, we’re all familiar with the old adage, “Give a man a fish; feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish; feed him for a lifetime” particularly, in the education circles.  However, since it is still as true today as it was in 4-6th century BC when Lao Tzu coined it, it’s no wonder it’s still circulating. And we would all probably agree that it’s valid. Yes, if you teach a man to fish he will (hopefully) learn how to fish. But what if he doesn’t care for fish, or – like most of us – would prefer a more varied diet?  What if he longs for rabbit, blackberries or a thick, juicy char-grilled portabella?

In fact, instead of teaching him one specific bit of information (how to fish) wouldn’t it be better to teach him a cognitive process he could apply towards anything? And, of course, wouldn’t it be ideal if you weren’t just teaching one man, but several together, who could mutually benefit from their shared experience and dialogue? Who could then take the analytical power you’ve invested in them out into the great big world and thrive?

I don’t know about you, but I am the product of a public education.  We moved around a lot when I was growing up and I attended several school districts. Some better, some worse; overall, my education was a mixed bag. I can’t say how it compared to others, but I can say – with absolute conviction – that I did not really learn how to think for myself until I went to university. Not properly. Though I completed my last two years of high school in the same state in which I would later go on to university (California), once I got there, I – and many others I knew – struggled. There seemed to be collective feeling of despair at the educational chasm that faced us. Yes, we’d had some good, perhaps even great, teachers. But we’d still left a system largely fuelled by textbook-led lectures, rote memorization and multiple-choice tests. The road was clear and easily navigated: the teacher talked, you followed the page in front of you; you studied. Then you fastened your seatbelt, took out your carefully sharpened #2, and (quickly!) manoeuvred your way through the bubbles. Suffice to say, I had little to fall back on when I was later faced, as a student at UC Santa Cruz, with the task of writing a 15-20pp paper on a poem from the traditional canon. I remember I choose Donne’s “Valediction Mourning” and that I received the worse marks (well, evaluation; back then UCSC still did evaluations) I’d ever received. I was shocked; I’d always believed I was good at English. Further, I was mortified to discover that in some classes I would be expected to lead lectures. For, up until then, I had managed (rather successfully) to escape getting up in front of the class for any considerable length of time.

If you’re still with me, I apologize for the delay in getting to my point. It’s taken me awhile to set the stage, but the reason I’ve gone into such personal (and hopefully not painful) detail is that I believe that for those of us who’ve gone through the public system, our experiences probably aren’t that different. In fact, it may be one of the primary things that attracted us as parents to RMCS in the first place…

We wanted something different for our children; something better. After all, their world differs vastly from the one we grew up in; for one thing it’s shrunk considerably. Technological advancements and an increasingly global marketplace have made our kids global citizens now. Yet, according to Wallis and Steptoe’s article in Time, How to Bring Our Schools Out of the 20th Century, “fewer than half of our (public) high school students are enrolled in a foreign-language class” and “the social studies curriculum tends to fixate on U.S. History.”

It doesn’t really sound like – across the board – that much has changed; does it?

Yet, thanks to the Internet and other technological advancements our kids are exposed to far more information now that they ever were; literally bombarded with TMI. According to a recent article published on PhysOrg.com, researchers predict that “the Internet will double in size every 5.32 years”. Today, our kids are forced in a way we never were to process information more rapidly, and more intelligently. To not only distinguish a good source from a bad one, but to manage it successfully. (All a long departure from our own childhood when you went to the local library to do a report, and often had to wait days for the book you needed to arrive…)

Yet, one of the parents at the Community Circle Meeting, employed by a leading publisher in education, says she’s noticed an alarming shift lately; from the textbook driving the education system to technology becoming the main vehicle. This in a system that has traditionally placed more importance on teaching content than process.

And all in the face of respected research that directly contradicts such methodology. In the 70’s, the Carnegie Foundation conducted a study on learning and retention. They found that as much as 95% of all learning is “primary”: meaning that which occurs spontaneously through encountering, embracing, and playing with our environment. Further, Allan Schore, a leading researcher in the field of neuropsychology, says (to paraphrase) that the brain is “experience dependent”; meaning that the actual growth of individual brain cells, and the learning connections they make, depend on their corresponding interactions with – and responses from – the environment.

Which, as a parent, is one of the things I admire most about RMCS’s curriculum; how it encourages and embraces experiential learning. How it recognizes that thematic, project-based and collaborative learning are vital. At the community circle meeting that day, one former alumnus disclosed that her choice for her independent project one year was Anne Frank, while her brother’s was root beer. Despite the dramatically different subject matter, they both learned a similar process; one that could – in the future – be applied towards anything.(Be it hunting, fishing or foraging.)

Obviously today’s kids need more than a public system that was, according to Wallis and Steptoe, “originally designed to educate workers for agrarian life and industrial-age factories”. Now, in the 21st century, they need to “ 1) Know more about the world. 2) Think outside the box. 3) Become smarter about new sources of information and 4) Develop good people skills.” As a parent, I firmly believe that RMCS is ticking each – and every – one of these boxes. At the Community Circle meeting Renee said, “I can’t believe this school started in 1977, and just how far ahead it was philosophically.”

Neither can I. Nor can I believe the panel of former RMCS alumni that were with us that day; all now freshman in the esteemed SILSA program at Asheville High School. I have never seen a group of more mature, more self-aware and more articulate young adults. I kept having to remind myself that they were high school – not university – freshman. Not only were they comfortable speaking to a room full of adults, they were extraordinary. When I compare myself – and my peers at that age – to the young people I saw before me, I feel like another species.  Not only did their testimony about their experiences at RMCS speak volumes, but so did their quiet confidence.  Now well into the first year of high school and all that it notoriously entails, these were not the kind of kids you might worry would lose their way. Instead, what was obvious is that they’re blazing their own, individual paths to the future.

Anyone concerned about the next generation should sit down and have a chat with them.

A special thanks to Sandra McCassim, RMCS’ 1st Grade Teacher, for her enlightening presentation. As well as former alumni: Wyatt Montgomery, Makenzie Peterson, Kaya Greenfield and Shannon Waldman.

Founded in 1977, Rainbow Mountain Children’s School offers a private, independent and alternative educational program for preschool through middle school-aged children that draws from the best in current educational thinking and holistic models of child development. It is recognized nationally as a leader in contemplative education.

Its progressive program supports the development of the whole child in five domains: mental, emotional, moral/social, physical and spiritual.

Marlo Bester-Sproul is a mother of a Rainbow Mountain Preschooler, and a writer and editor. You can reach her at www.writtenbird.com

Imagine having over thirty preschoolers under your care each and every day. Being responsible for not only each of their mental, emotional, moral/social, physical and spiritual needs; but also the far more rudimentary ones.Sixty small hands that must be washed and dried repeatedly throughout the day, thirty sleep mats that must be clean, covered and a specific width apart, and thirty lunch bags whose individual contents must each conform to a strict set of guidelines:  there must be milk (regardless of whether the child drinks it), there must be a napkin on which to set all food, there must be one portion of fruit, vegetable, carbohydrate and protein and though dried fruit is acceptable only fresh vegetable is allowed. Each and every lunch bag must be labelled with the current date, any water bottles left behind at the end of the day must be thrown away, a spare set of clothes must be kept at all times, etc, etc, etc.

It’s a lot to remember, and – no doubt – even more to enforce.

But this is just a glimpse of all the guidelines RMCS’ Preschool Staff* must take on board each, and every day. Along with, of course, the myriad of things that come with little people:  perpetually runny noses, scrapes requiring Band-Aids and – of course – hugs, and multiple-child negotiations that would try even the patience and diplomacy skills of Nelson Mandela.

So, it’s no small thing that not only does the Preschool Staff do the exceptional job it does, each and everyday, but that it also manages it so successfully that it has now been awarded the State of North Carolina’s highly respected, and much-coveted, five-star ECERS rating.

“It was an incredible process,” Judith Beers, Preschool Director at RMCS, told me.

The ECERS, otherwise known as the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale, was developed at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute of the University of North Carolina. It was designed to enable teachers to create developmentally appropriate learning environments for preschool and kindergarten aged children.  Its scale is used to develop and quantify quality standards in not only the US, but Canada and abroad.

The ECERS assessment is not required by state law; it is performed on a voluntary basis. However, in order to offer its community the strongest preschool program possible, RMCS chose to undergo the gruelling assessment.

Newly revised, the updated ECERS-R (the R is for revised) covers seven subscales in total: space and furnishings, personal care routines, language-reasoning, activities, interaction, program structure and – last but by no means least – parents and staff.

More broadly speaking, while the original ECERS was comprised of three core components: compliance, staff education, and the overall program itself, the updated ECERS-R has been narrowed down to two: staff education and the program. In the past, the preschool program at RMCS had received high scores on compliance and the overall program, but had fallen a little short on the staff education component. However, thanks to Judith and the rest of the staff’s perseverance and hard work the preschool program was able to bring the last piece up, and exceed expectations. In order to achieve this, Judith underwent some intensive administrative testing and portfolio work. She also worked hard towards creating some core materials for the program, including the Parent Handbook and the Staff Preschool Handbook; both of which went towards earning RMCS’ preschool program the valuable quality point. Additionally, the entire preschool staff had to assemble all transcripts and undergo further training.

Earning the ECERS’ five star rating is no small accomplishment; particularly when you’re trying to juggle Kleenex, Band-Aids, multiple-child negotiations and the all important hug. A big thanks to Judith and entire Preschool Staff* for going above and beyond, and for doing what they do each – and every – day.

*Judith Beers, Preschool Director at RMCS, has been teaching in preschools for more than 26 years, and over 15 years at Rainbow Mountain. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Speech and Hearing and has her Montessori Teaching Credential for ages 3 through 6.

Jessy Decker, Lead Teacher, has been teaching preschool at Rainbow Mountain for more than 11 years and received her early childhood teaching credential in 2001. She studied art and education for 3 years at Warren Wilson College, and she has taken courses in early childhood education at Western Carolina University and AB–Tech Community College.

Robe Kane, Lead Teacher, has been teaching preschool for more than 11 years.  This is his 8th year at Rainbow Mountain.

Brena Fletcher is an Assistant Teacher at Rainbow Mountain.

Written by Marlo Bester-Sproul mother of a Rainbow Mountain Preschooler and writer and editor. You can reach her at www.writtenbird.com