Farewell to a school

Well I certainly wouldn’t be the same person I am today without that school.  It was, in fact, the organization that brought me to know the man I would marry and the subsequent life and family we would build together.

I found it online, while surfing the web on my cousin’s laptop in our rented duplex in Highland Park St. Paul, after learning that my teaching contract in a small town of Minnesota was not renewed for the following year.  I found the job posting, applied, and found myself interviewing with a Nancy and a Jim, and soon boarding a plane early one Friday May morning.  I bought a matching pair of earrings and a necklace in honor of the occasion.

I met many names and faces that weekend, all intertwined with the common denominator of the school.  That school.  Sigh… that precious school.  I sat in the back of a roomful of seniors, but learned that I was not to be a fly on the wall in that unique school.  The teacher explained to the students that I was interviewing and deciding if this was the school for me.  They asked me questions, likely more than one, but the only one I remember was the question, “Why do we study history?”  I stumble-bumbled through my put-on-the-spot response, but my answer was close enough to what they hoped to hear.  Because we know – we all know, don’t we? – that to understand the present, we MUST understand the past.

I flew home, reviewing my thoughts with my family that next day – Mother’s Day, in fact.  Sorry, Mom—what a day to learn that your baby girl was going to move across the country for a school.  For that school.  But the weekend had showed me an organization that was out of the norm, like no school experience I had encountered before.  Teachers were mentors.  Students were engaged.  I wouldn’t have to teach to the party line as a government teacher.  I could make an effort to help my students to understand more of their faith in Christ and what that might mean to them as they pursued their education.

I moved.  I was all in.  Whatever fit in the Grand Am made the journey to my first little, cozy, sketchy apartment in Denver.  I was alone and at times very lonely.  But, the school.

The first day I came to realize that they had given me the best room in the whole school – who knows why… but I had floor to ceiling windows that looked out to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.  Sunlight flooding into the room of desks and shelves and the floor pillows in the corner from a bygone era.  I also came to realize that this school had no money, ever.  So none of us really did, which is also the beauty of it.  The staff who graced the walls and seats and halls of that school were there for the journey, there for the students, there for the transformation and the experiment of caring.  Caring for each soul and doing our darndest to help them to know that they were cared for.

Day one of staff training I prayed with Connie.  I PRAYED with a colleague?  I was in shock, coming from the public school setting.  I was welcomed immediately into the life of the school.  Dear friendships were formed.  Michael and Carolyn and I were all new… so we sat together on a blanket at the first picnic where old friends were catching up, and we met Michael’s wife and daughters and that was the beginning of friendships that were near and will always be dear.  In fact, more than a hearty bunch of those colleagues grew to be my close friends and mentors.

I look back on those early years with such sweetness, but remembering the heartache that was shared as tragedy upon tragedy came upon the school community.  A beloved art teacher, though unknown to me, had died and his loss had uncovered the depth to which he had been loved and the breadth of his influence on the staff and students who had known him.  A car accident took the life of a dear student of mine, whose smile and laughter and good-natured quips were painfully missing from the halls of the school for the rest of that year.  To grieve alongside my students, whose grief was overwhelming them is a memory I can’t forget.  And then the loss of dear Ginny.  How can we go on, Lord?  Life is not fair.  There seemed to be more than an appropriate dose of pain, hardship, grief, in those years, at that school.

I had no choice, no other choice but to lean on the Lord who saves.  I cried into my pillow, cried out into the night more times than I know in those years.  “If it is not for You, this isn’t worth it!” I would cry out.  This was life at the school, this relational school, where we cared, where I cared, where I loved.

I remember the fear on Adam’s face when he thought he’d have to sing in my voice class.  Adam!  The young man who loved the spotlight, loved to crack us all up, loved any and every chance to play tricks on the teacher, or be partners in mischief with Kip.  I had that one chance to play to his fears of singing a solo onstage, though I know that if it would’ve come to it, he would’ve shown us all up.  I miss Adam.

Without the school I wouldn’t have met Kim.  Or Angela.  Or Rachael.  Or Phil.  But mostly Nick.  My man… I met my husband, shook his manly, paint-spattered hand, at the ticket table of his sister’s musical performance at that school.  I melted inside right away, though of course my exterior perhaps was trying oh so hard to give off an “I Kissed Dating Goodbye” vibe that Joshua Harris could applaud.  I saw him at sporting events, then at church, then at Bible study, and then our first date.  Our first public event was to chaperone the school’s spring formal.  We drove up together and arrived at the event at the same time as Branden who saw us together and grinned and I am SURE had some smarmy comment aimed at Miss Larson.

 I have told friends how I sobbed my way through the middle of desolate Nebraska on my way out to Colorado and the teaching job at the school.  I had been thinking of the possibility that I would meet my husband in Colorado, and how complicated that would be, with my family in one state and his in another.  So I cried.  And today as I look back I think of the mercy of God that we are not given a window looking into our future.  I wonder if I would’ve chosen the life that I live and enjoy today?  I certainly wouldn’t have sought out any of the hard times, but where would I be without them?  The mystery of the future is a gift.  And my life now and my husband and family are directly tied to my experiences at the school.

I cannot mention all of the students who lived and loved and taught me how to better teach.  I walked into the classroom (twelve years ago almost to the day!) and was shown my “curriculum” – a student textbook of each of the history classes I was assigned to teach.  And no book at all for government.  Nothing.  Thankfully my college education classes had prepared me for this “worst-case scenario” teaching moment, so I hunkered down and buckled up and started writing and creating and deleting and refining and wondering and trying.  I had very little going on in those days, those early days.  I had moved for the school and for the job, and so I filled my evenings and weekends with lesson planning, sometimes in my one bedroom apartment, sometimes by the community pool until the neighbor men became too friendly, sometimes at the Caribou on Hampden that reminded me of my olden days in Minnesota.  Then I tried out my fresh-faced, new teacher ideas on my willing subjects – my students.  I grew to love them.  The teachers at the school were models to me of relational education at its finest.  They showed up to the events that their students were involved in.  They talked to them before and after school about life and struggles.  The students shared, too.  They allowed us in to their world.

I will miss the school, which has closed its doors after over 20 years of service to the southern suburbs of Denver.  I have plenty that makes me angry about the way in which the recent leadership took hold of the reins and re-created a school in a different model, but that is not the point here.  My anger perhaps stems from a feeling of great loss – that I had been part of a wonderful experiment in education that may not exist for me or for my children again.  I know that I am not the only one who feels this loss today.  But with gratitude I look back on my years at the school and see how tangibly my life is richer because of it.  All of the love to all of my former students and colleagues at JES…