Community School In Crisis Coal Camp

 When Elsie Ripley Clapp agreed to leave her cushy community school post in Jefferson County Kentucky and move her work to FDR’s Arthurdale, West Virginia New Deal project, this is what she faced.

Scotts Run Destitute Coal Miners

The NMU, National Miners Union, was organizing all over the place. Our federal government honchos feared a “commie insurrection”, and with good reason given the living conditions, so the combined idea of a subsistence homestead and a community school was born.

Miner Housing Scotts Run WVA

Elsie Ripley Clapp left the luxury of the Ballard Memorial School and parachuted directly into an economic cauldron of greed, labor abuse, human neglect and starvation.

There are many good things to report about the community school developed in Kentucky but later for that. Because nothing had prepared Clapp and her team for what they encountered in WVA. The mine owners disappeared once there was no profit to be made. And left behind miner families in shacks with no food, fuel, light, water, water or hope. The NMU was the only organization with a presence and a platform. Something had to be done.

Miner Family No Food, Water, Lights, Heat Or Hope

Community Schools In Action

 A “pioneer” in the Community School Movement was 1929 Elsie Ripley Clapp when she took John Dewey’s thinking on democracy into The Ballard Memorial School in Jefferson County Kentucky. Not all that far from Mayfield, Kentucky where today the public high school is still standing after last night’s devastating series of tornadoes. 

Mayfield High School has been turned into a shelter. People are taking refuge there. They are being fed, treated for injuries, fed nourishing, cafeteria meals. Clothing is provided, WiFi, relocation services, even transportation to another safe destination.

It does not take much to imagine this as an example of a community school IN ACTION. No one chose this weather catastrophe but it serves to remind us of what resources community schools can coordinate when administering to The Moment.

Elsie Clapp later ran a community school in FDR’s industrially ravaged Arthurdale, West Virginia. Starving families were literally selling body & soul just to stay alive when this Great Depression era school sprang up from a buckwheat farm and began demonstrating how public schools can enter a crisis and become the HUB and the ❤️ HEART of people-directed restoration and recovery.

Charter schools are in no position to do any of this work. It is not in their “DNA”. But it is the genetic makeup of community schools and there is plenty of crisis at hand. The Pandemic is the monster opportunity but so is the climate crisis headed our way.

Elsie Ripley Clapp learned how to enter, enjoy and energize the very humane energy stream of people-powered problem-solving. Community schools walk right into the middle of the fray, facing it head-on because they are the practical embodiment of We The People.

Community School Creative Time Keepers

 

Community School KIDS PLAYTIME

 

Stop trying to force children back into infectious school settings. Instead, consider these images. Take time with them. Recreate them. Imagine these worlds triumphing over disinfectant and distancing. Dream of fresh air, safety and ingenuity at the ready for all children everywhere.

Esau Jenkins Community School Protest Breathing

 Long before SCLC, SNCC or Freedom Summer, there was Esau Jenkins on Johns Island, SC.

He spoke at Mother Emmanuel A.M.E. in 1962.

We The People were introduced to Esau at the old Highlander Folk School, where he was a living legend.

In the earliest days, he operated a Citizenship School from inside a beat-up, yellow school bus which doubled as a rural peddler’s store on wheels.

That bus was a transport for remote island people and became a mobile classroom for political education back in the day when “Literacy Tests” were used to keep Black citizens from registering to vote.

Septima Clark joined him and so did Bernice Robinson, running Voter Registration classes inside Bernice’s home beauty salon.

Our Democracy is just as much in peril today as it was back in the 1950’s when Esau began “The Work”. Today there are literally thousands of people who would volunteer weeks or months to a movement that goes much deeper than just getting someone elected.

Esau, Septima and Bernice got everyone to tap into a bottomless well of courage, intelligence, practicality and commonality. 

Everyone “taught” each other. They practiced the art of talking out community problems and testing out solutions.  A rickety school bus became a co-op, became a gas & grocery station, became a credit union.  The evolution never stopped.

North, South, East and West, there are Hot Spots all over the USA with a lot of this tradition still percolating in their regional and cultural DNA.  Time to tap into it.

Community School Rubber Stamping