| Students
lounge about on the carpeted floor, resting their heads on bean bags or
looking up at the parachute draped from the ceiling. Some students
go barefoot. The scene is not nursery school. It’s high school
– The Maslow-Toffler School of Futuristic Education – for 160 Brentwood
students. The students are encouraged to lie on the floor, teacher
John Sherin says, as a result of psychologist Robert Ornstein’s theory
that when a person is sitting upright, the more rational half of the brain
is in control, but that when lying down, the creative half takes over. |
 The
school is housed in one wing of the Brentwood School District’s former
South Elementary School (the rest of the building is used for Special Education
and other programs). It is considered part of the School District,
but staff members make most of the administrative decisions, rather than
the building principal.
Any third or fourth year
student whose graduation would not be jeopardized by attending the school,
and whose parents give permission, may choose it instead of the regular
high school program. Students say that education at the Maslow-Toffler
School is something they look forward to. They like it, they say,
because
the school seems more friendly and more like a community than the crowded
regular high school, and because they are treated like individuals.
They actually look forward to school, they say.
“I come here all the time,”
says Terri A. Willis, who had arrived one morning at 8:30 even though her
only scheduled class that day was at 1:30 PM. “It’s like a home away
from home. I would never go to the high school because I wanted to.”
Parents, the school board
president, and Maslow-Toffler teachers are enthusiastic too. One
teacher, Johanna Fogliano, says, “It’s not like coming to work. It’s
like coming to be with friends.” Sherin, the teacher who handles
Maslow-Toffler’s work experience program, says, “I don’t think there’s
a staff member here whose whole life hasn’t been changed . . . “
“Very positive,” says Maureen
Belenger, president of the board, of her reaction to the school, now in
its second year.
Selma Kelson, whose daughter
Andrea, a senior, attends Maslow-Toffler, says “She likes the idea of learning,
which she never had before.” Mary O’Conner, whose son, James St.
Pierre, also is a student at the school, says that he gets up at 6:00 AM
voluntarily to go to school, and “he stays after the bell rings.”
“Most people think that they’re
doing nothing but dancing up and down in the halls” Ms. O’Connor says.
“They’re not,” Ms. Kelson says. “I don’t know what they’re doing
there, but they must be doing something right.”
What the Maslow-Toffler School
is doing right isn’t an easy thing to determine. Nor is it easy to
define exactly how it differs from other alternative schools. Even
the name isn’t easy to get right; it has been called, because it sounded
vaguely right, the mazeltov school. |
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| The
Maslow-Toffler School is named for psychologist Abraham Maslow and Alvin
Toffler, author of the book “Future Shock.” A question and answer
sheet prepared by staff members asks, “How does it differ” from other schools.
The answer: “You will not find such things as homerooms, study halls, cafeteria
and security guards, P.A. announcements, passes, suspensions, bells signaling
classes, grades, detentions, tracking, and 7:30 A.M. classes.”
This is in sharp contrast
to Brentwood High School proper, where there are 4,500 students, and where
classes for juniors and seniors start at 7:30 A.M. Sophomores start
class at 1:30 PM and don’t finish until 6 P.M.
“What can you expect if you
go?” the question sheet asks. The answer sounds at once terrifying
and a little corny: “Tremendous pressure, sensational satisfaction,
unbelievable frustration, incredible self-discovery, painful disconnection,
periodic alienation, improved social relationships, skill development,
personality growth, intellectual motivation, emotional liberation, spiritual
renaissance, and a vocabulary of new definitions for old words – like love." |
 Those
philosophies do not translate into a traditional class schedule, and for
one student, who retreated back to regular high school, “looking at his
empty schedule was like looking at an empty life,” Sherin says.
At Maslow-Toffler, courses
in such subjects as humanistic psychology and consciousness-raising last
for an hour and a half, but there are blocks of independent time in which
students may study, read, or start classes of their own. There are
coffee breaks during class if the students decide to take them. The
class size is kept at about 22, to allow for individual attention.
Students get grades only
in two college-level courses offered through Syracuse University’s Project
Advance. Credit also is earned through independent study and work
experience (at jobs approved by the school staff, such as with Islip Town
or at Pilgrim State Psychiatric Center), and teachers give written evaluations
of the students’ work. The independence allowed in managing their
own time helps prepare students who choose to go to college for the college
experience – “including getting closed out of classes” – one staff member
says.
Several other Long Island
districts, most notably Great Neck, which offers a variety of choices,
have alternative programs at the secondary level. Those on Long Island,
besides Great Neck, are Glen Cove, Lawrence, Farmingdale, Herricks, Roslyn,
West Hempstead, Westbury, Jericho, East Williston and Three Village, in
Setauket.
While alternatives in themselves
aren’t new, the contrasts offered by an alternative program in the over-burdened
21,000-student Brentwood district are even sharper than they would be in
some of the more affluent communities like Great Neck and Jericho.
And since the school accepts anyone “whose graduation would not be jeopardized”
because of a problem with course credits, the small student body is a mixture
of students from different backgrounds, and from one end of the ability
grouping system to the other.
“Here there’s no tracks and
you can associate with everybody,” Terri Willis says. Brian Bleistein,
another senior, told about becoming friendly with an honors student he
never would have had a chance to know, because they never would have shared
classes in the regular high school. Ken Reed, who attended Maslow-Toffler
last year and graduated, says that in the ordinary high school, “I would
close up and withdraw. Here, I’m very outward . . . You were looking
constantly at people’s heads, sitting in rows, and you never got to talk
to them.” Reed’s reading ability jumped from 9th to 12th grade level
in one year, although there was less required reading, because he was motivated
to read more, he says.
 On
a bulletin board at the school there is posted Maslow’s definition of a
“self-actualizing person”: someone “who is able to fully use and exploit
his talents, capacities and potentialities.” One of the school’s
goals is that students become "self- actualizing.”
Toffler, according to the
same bulletin board, believes that the “educational system must change
itself and begin to prepare students for their future, instead of the traditional
industrial society expectations.”
One of the schools strongest
precepts, Sherin says, at least at the first of the school year when students'
egos are tender, is that “we will never reject you.” The students’
behavior is, at first, unconditionally accepted. |
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| On
a recent day, Ken Moss was conducting an acting workshop and found that
nobody had brought anything for a “taste test”. "I want you to have
the experience, but I will not do it myself. Call it a mild lecture,
call it whatever you want . . . I feel a certain amount of resentment .
. . “ They decided to try again, on a day the following week.
In a “Views of Nature” session,
John Sherin was exploring with his class the view that “nature is an obstacle”.
The students all were asked to try to think of times when, because they
were small children, they had felt powerless, limited by their helplessness.
They told about waves, hurricanes, confrontations with parents, running
away but not being allowed to cross the street, starting a fire and not
being able to put it out because the kitchen sink was out of reach.
At one point Sherin said
candidly, “Stop me if I’m getting too wordy, or if you’d rather do something
else.”
Students constantly are encouraged
to talk about their experiences and feelings. In Ms. Fogliano’s Consciousness
Raising Class, the discussion began with the differences between words
such as lady, woman, girl, man and boy, and then moved on to feelings and
attitudes about sex education. “I think it’s in fifth grade they
have a film in the cafeteria and put paper over the windows so the guys
can’t see in,” Dorothy Hughes said. “It’s almost like a porno movie,”
Ms. Fogliano agreed.
All the teachers, six full
time and several part time, had taught at Brentwood High School.
The school was created, Moss says, when it was announced at a school board
meeting that South Elementary School would close. Other alternatives
were proposed, but only Maslow-Toffler survived. It has been a new
experience for the teachers, Moss says, because “we have been involved
in all the decisions.” The building principal is a “co-worker and
service person” in this school, he adds.
Moss says that the teachers
in the alternative school pose something of a threat to the regular teaching
staff. “We have encouraged a community feeling, from which others
feel excluded,” he says,“ and there is some hostility.” Jack Zuckerman,
the President of the Brentwood Teachers Association, says that “relations
between that faculty and the regular faculty are not as good as I would
like . . . At this point, it’s not seen as a threat.”
And Zuckerman adds, “The
evaluation of the program is something we’re concerned with . . . We’re
going to have to come up with criteria that everyone agree on. I
don’t think you would find that most teachers are prepared for that approach.”
Gerald Cohen, co-chairman
of guidance at one of the two regular high school buildings, says, “I like
the program myself. I don’t agree with everything they do, but I
think it’s working . . . Psychologically, it’s positive for quite a number
of the kids.”
Moss says that last year’s
students gained a great deal of confidence and “ability to talk to adults”
by giving presentations on the school at colleges, for which they were
paid. “It’s not just the normal development of maturity that happens
in the senior year,” Sherin says, “It was something super.”
| Does
the school make a difference in academic achievement? Last year 20
students who had been at least one year below grade level in reading gained
an average of 1.5 years in their reading levels. One student, who
later made the highest score in his group on an entrance test for the Marines,
advanced five years in reading grade levels. And about 72 percent
of last year’s students were reading more books at the end of the year.
“I’ve retained more learning
here,” Eric Price says, after three weeks of alternative school, “than
in three years. I’ve learned to like myself. I was always uptight
there.” |
Terri says that in the regular
high school, a counselor told her she couldn’t be a veterinarian because
her marks weren’t high enough. “I don’t think I want to be a vet
anymore, but if I wanted to, I could. I really believe I can be anything
I want to,” she says.
“Brentwood will be like Great
Neck,” Sherin says. “One day, we’ll have eight or nine alternatives.” |
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(Photos: Newsday
article photo; Students and staff playing, 1974; Forum, the community gathering,
1974.)
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