The Pacific Sun

February 23, 2005

Marin’s Charter Schools

by Steve McNamara

NOVATO CHARTER SCHOOL, 1996
This highly popular Waldorf-method K-8 school is chartered by the Novato Unified School District. It now occupies a developing campus of portables at the north end of Hamilton, having been squeezed out of the base’s Meadow Park Elementary School due to the district’s growing student population. Novato Charter’s long waiting list shrank when some parents feared leftover toxics at the new site, despite evidence to the contrary, and left. But there is again a waiting list of more than 200 and a nail-biting lottery system to get for free an education costing $12,000 or more at a private Waldorf school. Half the students are from Novato, the rest from as far away as Point Reyes Station, Petaluma and Sausalito.

The guiding powerhouse at Novato Charter is Director Rachael Bishop. She started two private Waldorf schools in Sonoma County before being called in by the Novato Charter’s founding parents-who had underestimated the need for an expert professional administrator. Novato Charter is a Waldorf-method school, combining Waldorf and current educational practices, not a full-on Waldorf school. The full-on version features founder Rudolph Steiner’s spiritual approach, called anthroposophy, and items such as third grade focus on the Old Testament. Both are no-nos in publicly funded education.

Steiner’s idea was “to meet the children where they are developmentally.” Students often move through the grades with the same teacher; they must screen out jarring influences exemplified today by electronic media; classes are taught using a block system, allowing deep focus, often on a theme such as California in the fourth grade and the Middle Ages and Renaissance in the seventh. Bishop says there are 40 Waldorf-method charter schools in California and, “I don’t mean to brag, but we are the top one. We’re on a roll. I’m very happy not to be in the struggle part anymore.”

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