How our community came to be.
In February, a group of 8 or 9 families living in South Orange, Maplewood and West Orange began meeting to discuss starting a school. Our kids were drowning during the pandemic and we were looking for life rafts.
We wanted to know if there was enough interest locally to start an affordable progressive school that could be the antidote to hours on end of screen time, a school that valued hands-on interdisciplinary learning. So we began inviting the community to participate in our group.
First, 40 people came to a virtual conversation.
Then 145 people responded to a survey.
Within two to three months, we had found advisors, formed a non-profit, registered it as a school, and begun recruiting students, with the hopes of finding the perfect location in the community.
In the first week of recruiting, 20 students applied.
As luck would have it, there was a vacant school building in South Orange that had been occupied by Weekday Preschool, a 70 year old secular school that educated generations of South Orange children, until the pandemic suspended its operations in July 2020.
It seemed like the perfect place. So we began talking to the owners of the building, the First Presbyterian Trinity Church, about renting it. But as the summer went by, we realized that, from a compliance perspective, a better solution for 2021 was for the church to relaunch Weekday and invite the community to be part of it.
In August, Weekday vetted and hired a staff of excellent progressive educators, taking into consideration those we recommended, and has resumed enrolling students. Our entire community enrolled there and started school September 9. We are excited about what the 2021-22 school year will bring for us at Weekday.
If you’d like to join us there this year, email Weekday’s director, Samantha Grab, to learn how to apply. If you’d like to join us in 2022-23, after we’ve found a home for The Village School, please apply here.