Inventive New Private School Hits Old Hurdles
Caitlin McCauley, an art therapy intern, helping Nova, 4, at the Blue School in the East Village.
Students in the “wonder room.” Social and emotional skills are given equal weight to reading and math at the Blue School.
After students read “The Great Kapok Tree” and became interested in the rainforest, the Blue School constructed one.
The school was in the East Village, not uptown, and its leaders were not bluebloods but the founders and spouses of the Blue Man Group, the alternative theater troupe.The school, which is entering its fourth year, has remained true to its progressive roots, with “imagination stations” and “glow time.” Children help direct the curriculum, and social and emotional skills are given equal weight to reading and math.But the school has also developed some characteristics familiar to any New York private school parent. Children must now take the same $510 intelligence test that other schools require for admission. Tuition for kindergarten is now more than $28,000.
And despite the fact that it has no permanent real estate, limited financial aid and no track record of placing students in top schools, six families applied for each available slot in next fall’s preschool class. “We’ve become what we were rebelling against,” said Matt Goldman, one of the founders.
The Blue School, consciously or not, tapped into one of New York’s great and frustrating economic paradoxes. In an entrepreneurial city where even volatile commodities like real estate eventually find their equilibrium, the desire for private school seats has outpaced supply for many years, in some cases by an order of magnitude. Even though a substantial number of schools opened when the economy was humming, the math remains the same, or in some cases is worse. “Demand levels are much more significant than they were 10 years ago,” said Roxana Reid, founder of Smart City Kids, an admissions advisory service.
The Blue School’s founders say they began their school not for economic opportunity, but because they were disappointed in the options they had found for their own children. “We saw beautiful preschools, but most of them didn’t involve the parents as much as we wanted to be involved,” said Jen Wink, another founder. So they built a play group and, after one year, made it a school.
They hired curriculum consultants and specialists and experts. They traveled. They debated, internally and externally. They were attracted to the Reggio Emilia philosophy of learning, which integrates what children want to learn with what teachers and parents want to impart. To that end, it has two “provocateurs” on the staff whose job is to inspire different “threads of learning,” planting ideas and building areas of study around the ones that take.
After a teaching candidate read “The Great Kapok Tree” to a class of first graders, they took interest in the rainforest. A provocateur built the classroom into a rainforest, replete with a kapok tree whose (plastic) leaves cover the ceiling. The children have studied the animals that live in the rainforest and are now exploring whether the Littles, characters from another story they read, might live in the kapok tree. They write letters to the Littles and even create math tests for them.
Once a week, 4-, 5- and 6-year-olds mix together at imagination stations grouped around subjects like language arts, music and movement. On a recent morning, one group was stationed in the hallway singing “Frère Jacques” in Mandarin; in a classroom, another group was imitating the sound of rain on a giant drum (it was pouring outside). When the children got overly excited by their Blue Man Group-style drumming, they calmed down with breathing exercises. Another Blue Man inspiration is glow time, when natural or incandescent light is replaced by black light and children transform their environment using props like shaving cream, play dough or glow-in-the-dark blocks to study things like light, shadow and outer space.
But the approach at the Blue School, which now has 87 students in preschool through first grade and is preparing to expand, does not come cheap. While the founders never intended to educate children at no charge, they said they did not expect to have to charge $28,400. “When we started, we knew that some private schools charged $32,000 a year, and we were like, ‘You’re kidding me,’ ” said Mr. Goldman, who is a graduate of the Ethical Culture Fieldston School. “Now we say, ‘How do they do it with just $32,000?’ ” The founders looked at what other private schools charged and settled on a tuition right in the middle, he said.
One major cost is the same one that has bedeviled many private schools, and is the reason more of them have not opened: real estate. Twice the founders have come close to acquiring the 50,000 to 60,000 square feet they need to expand the school through eighth grade, but the deals fell apart.
The school is changing as it goes. Beginning this school year, the founders required an intelligence test, administered by a company called the Educational Records Bureau, as part of the application process. The test is required at most of the city’s exclusive private schools, though some, like the Mandell School, do not ask for it. The founders said that since many of their applicants were also trying to get into schools that required the E.R.B. test, it did not seem like too much of an imposition, because the test result can be sent to multiple schools. The school, like many others, says that it does not require a minimum E.R.B. score, and that the test is one of many tools used in admissions. “It gives us one piece of the child, which is valuable,” said Renee Rolleri, another founder, “and we can better respond to their academic strengths and areas to work on.”
Many parents are clearly unfazed by the school’s requirements and absence of a track record. “This school was our top choice; we wanted to be a part of it,” said Marah Anderson, whose son Finnegan is in kindergarten. Ms. Anderson said that her son was accepted to two other schools, but that she preferred the holistic approach of the Blue School. “There is a lot of research that supports this approach to learning,” she said. “It’s just not as widely implemented.”
The school is soliciting donations to bolster its financial aid and help in its search for space. But it says that despite the common perception that money helps in private school admissions, donors’ children will not be given preference. “What we have learned,” Mr. Goldman said, “is that you are judged as a school at least as much by the admissions process as by the education itself.”
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