Flourishing at Forty
Dear Members of The Waldorf School of Santa Barbara Community,
It’s a truism, yes, but worth considering: it’s easy to not notice our gifts. To not notice the gift of being accorded life, the gift of having children, of having food in the fridge, clear drinkable water that flows from our taps, clean beds to sleep in, a beautiful town to enjoy. Moreover, it’s easy to forget the gift of our school.
And then you’re walking through the Great Room during recess on a Tuesday and you glimpse some Eighth Graders at the piano. One student is playing Chopin. And the playing is not only able and confident, but expressive, delicate. You pause, despite your adult busy-ness, to take the music in. And you notice that the Eighth Graders sitting and standing around the piano are hazy-eyed, abstracted, lost to the music’s spell. They are being fed without their quite knowing it. They are inhabiting a moment, a situation, of deep beauty, without their quite knowing it. And suddenly you feel a welling of gratitude, an unbidden, unmanufactured welling of gratitude—gratitude for this particular school. Very clearly, you see this school’s uniqueness (such scenes are not common elsewhere); very clearly, you see this school’s profound value (such situations enrich our lives inestimably); very clearly, you see that this is the education that children need right now.
Likewise, you happen to bump into recent WSSB alums. And they speak to you with undisguised ache of how badly they miss this community; of how they want to come back. They miss adults saying “hi” to them in the morning. They tell you they want to return as a class for a day to work with clay again, to paint with watercolors. And they are not joking. Momentarily, they’ve dropped their cocksure teenage masks, dropped their heavy fronting, and with unselfconscious honesty they tell you they want to come back.
The Waldorf School of Santa Barbara has been providing a space for Chopin, clay work, and watercolor painting (and soccer, chemistry experiments, history lessons, storytelling, contra-dancing, chicken-tending, flute-playing, sock-knitting, woodworking, seed-keeping, and Halloween Journeys) for forty years. Please, really take that in. This is no paltry achievement. In other words, our community is coming upon a remarkable milestone.
In light of this milestone, we are launching our “Flourishing at Forty” fundraising campaign. To ensure the flourishing continuity of our unique and precious (and needed) WSSB community, we aim to raise $100,000 this year and aim to enroll more children. To help us reach these goals you can do three things:
1). You can give money yourself (no gift is too small; none too big).
2). You can forward this newsletter—and other newsletters—to friends, family, and potential families and donors.
3). You can broadcast far and wide the unique preciousness of The Waldorf School of Santa Barbara. (Tell friends and friends of friends. Be a shameless trumpet of praise. There’s no better PR campaign.)
Just a few years ago the student population at WSSB was 85. Now we are at 140. That’s an almost 65% increase. Clearly, our unique value is catching on. And to flourishingly serve this enlarging student body, we need to expand our staff accordingly. Importantly, we also need to make sure we pay our current teachers enough to live in the expensive Santa Barbara area. Furthermore, we need money for campus improvements and to nurture nascent programs. Finally, we need money for our Tuition Assistance Program, a program which ensures a diverse student body. In other words, your financial gifts to WSSB are integral. In other words, your financial gifts to WSSB will help us continue to flourish.