Summit School for the Arts was a charter school in Chisago City, MN. I first heard about it when I was 15, peddling handmade goods at a craft fair. A short Caucasian Sikh man with a long white beard and a crocheted cap told me about the school and got me interested. After dragging my parents to a meeting at the unused summer camp where the school was located, I enrolled.
Summit School was small. There were never really more than 50 students, k-12, and most of the time the student body was only half that size. There was a teacher for the younger kids and a teacher for the older kids. One or two administrators. And parent volunteers usually present. A board of directors was technically responsible for everything. I sat on this board as a student representative beginning at age 16.
Learning was mostly self-directed, with each student working an individualized plan. There were some structured classes, which were taught by parents or community members. Physical education was perhaps the most interesting. My favorite was fencing, with kinesiology a close second.
While I spent a few days a week commuting to college classes in the city, my days at the school were typically unstructured. I just did whatever I felt like and so did everybody else. The permissive environment did produce some good learning outcomes. But the whole thing was basically a hippie fantasyland, which was problematic because it was a publicly funded school.
The first time I really tripped on mushrooms was at a reggae concert at age 16 with that Caucasian Sikh, who was the school's official 'visionary.' He got his family members jobs with the school and they sold weed to students like me. They also apparently misused funds. As a teenager, I participated in their shenanigans and thought they were great. But eventually, the law took notice.
The state shut the school down and the cops started asking questions. The visionary and his family left town suddenly. Sympathetic to our plight, the state allowed me and a few other students to complete our graduation projects and receive diplomas.
For a long time, I took the school's failure as a personal failure. And it is true that my actions contributed to the erosion of the organization's legitimacy. But on reflection, I came to understand that the school's adult officials were criminally incompetent. Had I never been involved, they probably would have wrecked that school just as thoroughly.
The hardest part of all of it is that Summit School's individualized learning plans actually worked. Its use of community experts to teach classes made perfect sense. The days I spent with another student in an unused basement room, listening to Jefferson Airplane records and making art, did more to prepare me for my real life than regurgitating the contents of some textbook ever could have. The school should have become a great example of effective alternative education, but the incompetence and corruption made it an example of what not to do instead.
By the time my graduation was official, I had moved to Chicago. No one asked to see my diploma when I got a job as a barista at a coffee kiosk in the entryway of the Cook County Hospital. No one has asked to see this document since, either. It sounds prestigious. Summit School for the Arts. Behind the prestige, it was merely an uncontrolled social engineering experiment. One that failed spectacularly.
(Feature image from Pixabay.)
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