I first learned of the Children's Project shortly after arriving in Los Alamos on the Central Coast of California. A new friend, who involved himself on occasions in service to the town, wondered if I had heard about the project. It seemed that a group had formed around an idea to benefit the foster children of Santa Barbara county. The idea was to seek a charter and then to build a public charter boarding school for foster children. It would be a unique concept in public education. And it was to be built right here in Los Alamos.
I learned that the active force behind the idea and the driver of the project is a former television series actress currently practicing law in Santa Barbara named Wendy Kilbourne Read. I fired off an e-mail to Wendy and she graciously agreed to meet me in a little coffee shop in Santa Ynez. I was eager to share my character and leadership education practices that I had developed at my former position in an eastern boarding school and so set aside a folder full of lessons, frameworks, and scholarly dissertations that illustrated my work. Fortunately for both of us, in my haste I brought the wrong file. Because what followed instead was a free flowing exchange of ideas about children and character education and opportunities.
I learned that Wendy had taken on responsibility for volunteering time with a six year old foster child. She quickly became discouraged by the quality of his passage from childhood to his eventual emancipation from the court system, a journey which included 26 dis-placements. She questioned the need for a life of continual turmoil. She realized the cyclic nature that such instability initiates: the consequent lack of academic focus and achievement, the inevitable narrowing of opportunity, the resignation to a poorer life and prospects. Wendy's association with a local private boarding school might have suggested the 'Ah hah!' moment that sent her along her current road toward the creation of a foster child boarding school. But like any good student, she did her own homework. She traveled around the country and even to Israel visiting similar schools instituted for similar reasons. Each visit added fuel to her enthusiasm. At the time of our meeting, The Children's Project had taken large strides toward influencing potential stakeholders and raising private funds and had already acquired land. A great deal of the time consuming work was then being focused on acquiring a charter. I was later privileged to witness the fruit of this labor when I attended the meeting at the County Board of Education in Santa Barbara at which the charter was granted.
As The Children's Project brochure and web site (www.childrensprojectsb.org) can tell you, The Children’s Project Academy is a residential charter school that will enable 120 7th-12th grade foster youth to live with passionate, dedicated foster parents and alongside their teachers, foster grandparents and staff, in this way creating permanent relationships with caring adults. And a permanent place to reside, work, and play among children like themselves, a place to call home.
I find myself uniquely positioned to foresee the potential benefits to both the Gown and the Town. Around me in my little community within a community in Los Alamos live refugees from a nearby town of similar size now advanced in the shaping of its character beyond reclamation. At one time, that town would have stood poised to make decisions that must determine the quality of its future. In a land of tourism and a successful wine industry a choice that favored wine tasting rooms and boutique stores supporting that industry is not surprising and probably necessary. But the occasional outcome for the residents, the dark underside of inebriated tourism with its noise, fumes, and filth, is what sent my neighbors packing to Los Alamos.
I grew up in a community that supported a private boarding school and my career subsequently took me to another community enveloping not one but two private boarding schools. In each case the net effect was the same: the economy of the community gradually lifted by the tangential benefits of a residential school in its midst while the quality of life and attractiveness of the town was maintained. Today both communities are surrounded by overpopulated and noisily gridlocked towns yet themselves remain an oasis of calm, dignity, and space. This is not magic; it is the fact that every town decision is made in some consideration of the young people who live in its heart and the perspective of other young people and adults who will come from other schools and towns to visit them.
The Children's Project Academy is a wonderful and worthy project that appears to have no down side. But as always with initiatives of such size and scope, there remain substantial hurdles to overcome before completion. There will be those who would oppose it and those who wish to diminish it. Now, however, at this particular time of year is the right time to celebrate not perhaps the realization of this vision so much as the spirit of caring that brought the vision to light.
