When Elsie Ripley Clapp first toured the ruined coal camps of Scotts Run WV, they were dangerous places. Children were dying and so were the adults. No, not dangerous like the gun massacre in Uvalde TX.

In Great Depression Era Scotts Run, no one had thousands of dollars to spend on expensive weapons of war + ammo. Even bullets for a squirrel gun were at a premium. So was the squirrel meat. Everyone was starving and perishing the old fashioned way. TB, scurvy, rickets, pellagra, typhoid, pneumonia, hunger. Slow and lethal.

Elsie Clapp came from the social and economic class of people responsible for this carnage. What she saw came as no surprise.

She knew that the Gilded Age had made their millions off the backs of laboring miners and then simply walked away once the plunder was complete. She knew this but she did not accept it. It was wrong and it could be remediated. And so she set about creating a Community School.

There could be no Community School without living-breathing inhabitants. And conditions had been allowed to get so bad that the area most closely resembled a war zone full of 4,000-5,000 skeletal humans on their very last leg. President Hoover had been sitting on a fund of money originally designated for feeding Belgian and French children post WWI.

At long last the war relief money was ultimately handed over to Alice Davis, Nadia Danilevsky and Clarence Pickett with the American Friends Service Committee. Food rations and fuel for warmth and cooking was the first order of business. Clapp described seeing scrawny children playing in stinky, sulphur-ridden puddles by the side of the road. She walked into a long, corrugated-iron shed with #7 painted on the roof. Down the length of the shed were small cots. A wood stove was at one end and a jerry-rigged shower at the other. A young woman with an ancient air about her, bent over and toothless, introduced Elsie to the improvised, rudimentary Nursery School. “We bathes ‘em. We feeds ‘em and we sleeps ‘em,” she proudly announced. This constituted a beginning at the center of oblivion.

ERC went to the West Virginia coalfields AFTER the Energy Oligarchs had taken the money and RUN back to Wall Street. She set about creating a John Dewey-inspired Community School in the midst of rich, reactionary USA.

It looked a lot like 2022. Today in Texas, the Fat Cats are hunting down Beto O’Rourke and his campaign for Governor. BETO should see them for who they really are. Sheldon Whitehouse would like to assist with the eye opening.

Canyon Lake area is very BIG money. Lake houses, boats, expensive recreational toys, gas-guzzling SUV’s, multiple Airstreams. Weekend homes, retreats, resorts. Local, everyday middle class people there are treated to a Canyon Lake version of the oligarch playground. BETO can’t secure a campaign event venue in Comal County because the money men don’t want him or his democracy.

This is calculated, strategized, High Finance Fascism. Leading the assault on BETO are the very same people who stand to benefit from ending the filibuster for Gorsuch. FBI tanking of the Kavanaugh investigation. Inserting unqualified Amy Barrett onto The Bench. Spending $580M to OWN SCOTUS. Establishing the Federalist Society as the MAGA headhunter for SCOTUS nominees. Paying $17M to purchase the services of Right Wing Nominees. Destroying a Woman’s Right To Choose. Polluting everything/everywhere for FREE. Loading up the USA with Dark Money. Abolishing Voting Rights. Deregulating The World. Demolishing public Schools. And so much more. It is an old script and one that Clapp confronted once she arrived in Arthurdale, riding on FDR-New Deal coattails.

Sheldon Whitehouse posted his 2022 list and is warning BETO and the rest of America To Buckle Up ‘Cause It’s Gonna Be A Bumpy Ride. There is no time for “engaging” with these rapacious monsters. They are Hungry Ghosts with insatiable appetites. BETO has great energy and instincts but he needs to WISE UP & toughen up. Take it from Elsie Clapp. Everything we hold dear in our Democracy is at stake.

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.

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.

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 or hope. The NMU was the only organization with a presence and a platform.

Everyone could have decided just to allow the NMU’s analysis to dominate. Theirs was not so much an act of ideology or propaganda, since blind, deaf and dumb Helen Keller could have readily figured out that industrial capitalism was not working for anyone in Scotts Run.

The miners required no outside agitators because they were experiencing firsthand what transpires once the Fat Cats have cashed out. Those miners’ fury contained a transformative energy that was alternately retaliatory and relentless.

Elsie Clapp was about to try creating a community school where there was no community. Maybe where no semblance of community was even possible. Everyone she encountered was on their last leg and fresh out of patriotism.

Scotts Run conditions are nothing new to educators who work in Title I schools. Settlements of people where gainful employment is cancelled, exported or excluded by a prevailing paradigm of greed, do tend to go hungry, get violent, self medicate and establish bootleg economies. It is NOT Mr. Roger’s neighborhood. But it is a politically criminal construct, devoid of conscious and with a bad habit of blaming the victim. The boom had gone bust.

The about-to-be community school was only one of many ”stars” in a constellation of federal agencies suddenly vying for funding, visibility, control and prominence. It was Presidential Power Politics from the git-go and it was a huge pain in the neck for Elsie Ripley Clapp.

The Great Depression was no Shock Doctrine Surprise Disaster. In fact Herbert Hoover and his cohorts had been watching it unfold like a slow moving slasher movie. Spectators and Instigators combined, the federal government did nothing until revolution was at their doorstep. It was then that Hoover put Texan Jesse Jones and the RFC into action. A White House Conference on Child Welfare was convened and suddenly, the leftover WWI funds from feeding starving Belgian and French children were unearthed. That money was given to Clarence Pickett and the American Friends Service Committee of Philadelphia. Humanitarian relief became a good idea and an immediate, hot political potato.

Elsie Clapp rode into the devastated West Virginia mining camps on the coattails of Eleanor Roosevelt and the newly-elected FDR. Not the most auspicious moon under which to launch a subsistence homestead or a community school. Chaos reigned supreme and so did critics. By the summer of 1933 the NRA/National Recovery Act was funded and looking to relocate displaced and disgusted populations cramped and crowded into industrial centers where righteous insurrection was a certainty. John Dewey could not protect her here. Nor could waxing philosophically on the virtues of democracy. If they/she wanted a community school, it would require a seasoned educator with the skill set of a roadhouse bouncer.

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.

While Elizabeth Catlett’s apprentice was upstairs dodging the literacy hall police, the downstairs first grade wing was under an equally intense assault. After all, it is both insulting and assaultive to march into a room full of young children one does NOT KNOW and proceed to to “instruct” them.

This is the destructive fallacy behind techno/researched, data-driven, high finance interventions. They are all rooted in anonymity. The victims must remain invisible, devoid of personhood, reduced to a statistic and just another face in the crowd. The crowd must travel under some sort of label. Any of these will do: Low Income, Impoverished, Title I, Minority, Disadvantaged, Below Grade Level or how about Person of Color? The label becomes an authorization for every manner of outrage. On this day, the color was ORANGE.

An easel was hauled into the middle of a squirming, scooting, squirrelly bunch of six year olds. The fidgety ones were meant to be and designed to be moving about a classroom fingering, eyeballing, counting, weighing, comparing and investigating. That was their instinctive idea of math in practice but alas, it was not to be. Because someone was clutching the Letters of Transit that entitled her to travel into this assembly, command silent, single-minded attention and foist upon them a dog and pony show completely divorced from the most immediate, everyday life of the neighborhood.

I plopped down onto the floor, hiding criss cross applesauce behind a gaggle of gabby girls who were clearly in the thrall of a true boss. She was streetwise, you could hear it in her voice. She had secrets everyone wanted in on. But the easel idiot in charge of this convocation was too busy with her scripted presentation to detect the dynamic.

Princess Pythagoras proceeded in a conspiratorial whisper as if the babyfied, remote feltboard, imitation pumpkin program had evaporated into a magical mist. With an intimate, affirming gaze she began. “Well if I had five bucks. Really! If I had five bucks, here’s what I would do. You know those suckers the ladies sell down in the lunchroom? So they each cost a quarter. That’s 25 cents. And if I had five bucks, I would go there and I would walk right up to the cash register and I would say Please Give Me 20 Suckers. I’d hand over my five dollar bill and then I’d walk around our table and give everyone a sucker. There are 20 of us and every kid in our class would get a sucker.”

Of course she got called out for not listening, for being off-task, inattentive, disrespectful, disruptive – a distinct but distractive voice in the wilderness of pre-packaged, early literacy curriculum. She rolled her eyes, shrugged her shoulders, prompting a giggle from her swarm of admiring sucker sisters.

In an instant she was revealed. Perhaps the oldest child in a big family. Competent, confident and quite capable of taking ten dollars from her adult’s pin money for a grocery shop at the nearby convenience store. She was experienced at traversing sidewalks safely, negotiating ped-xings and traffic lights. In her head she routinely and roughly calculated the prices for required family staples, remaining under budget and on top of change due. She was a trusted, mission accomplished kind of kid.

But every bit of it was lost on the university instructor, parachuted behind the lines to film a literacy infused math lesson featuring pumpkin pablum. Her fruit-free exposition met a juicy grant requirement and was later featured as yet another false flag for age appropriate, child friendly, field-based and effective.

He was in 3rd grade and was “failing” using every measure employed by the bureaucracy. Reduced to data points, no one bothered to look him square in his humanity. Their destructive incompetence remained sanctioned, documented and institutionalized. And that’s the way it is done these days.

He was forever running out of class, refusing to participate in his sham of a classroom. The assigned “teacher” should have been fired ages ago. Her professional record on file at district headquarters documented omission after commission after irresponsibility. So instead of placing her in remediation, she was awarded a hefty stipend and assigned to an urban academy where teachers in good standing were supposed to be demonstrating how to effectively instruct in a high poverty school. What a joke!

The room she inhabited was in shambles by design. No effort was made to create an extraordinarily beautiful and attractive place. After all, the wild ones were raised in slums and bore the destructive impulses of a slum and destroyed everything they touched, or so the narrative was constructed and widely reported.

Anyone in a right frame of mind would flee this place every hour on the hour. And so he did. I found him wandering the hallway clutching Elizabeth Catlett’s illustrated Lift Every Voice And Sing. He was carrying Elizabeth because he had copied her. His picture book was crammed full of drawings he had faithfully reproduced of every linotype Elizabeth had rendered in her collection of images.

He knew his time would be better spent working on an apprenticeship under Elizabeth Catlett’s watchful eye than attending to the fool on the hill who was presiding over his education. Naturally, he was “failing” every subject because he was disengaged with all of it. The big bosses pulled the plug on him and he responded by refusing to ingest the systemic poison or breathe the tainted air. Hence the regular escapes to the nooks and crannies of the 2nd floor corridor. As far as I was concerned, his drawings were his hall pass, a portfolio brimming with interest, concentration and competence. “He can’t read,” everyone insisted at Child Study. But James Weldon Johnson disagreed and so did Elizabeth Catlett.

Of course, this is what a READER looks like. He falls in love with a story, a poem, a song, an illustrator and he spends every free moment committing the whole adventure to memory, replicating the rhythm, the cadence, the eloquence and the artistry. Never mind that he can’t unlock every vowel and consonant combination. He is hooked on a book for the transformation it can provide. What more needs to be said? The university types, promoting their own cash cow literacy research upon the backs of impoverished children, stayed in business and in the money by declaring him illiterate. The nerve of these people!

He ignored them, dismissed them and dissed them.

His sword and shield was a picture book held tightly over his heart chakra for protection. A bookworm if I ever met one.

We really wanted our school to be the center of the community. So we arranged to use our school kitchen.

The Puerto Rican parents cooked for the Italian parents one day. One mother remarked, “You know, when I was invited to eat in a Spanish restaurant I said I would not because to me Spanish food represented those people whom I didn’t know and didn’t understand. I actually thought they were pigs. But now I am here. I saw the food being cooked. I liked it and I am going to cook it for my own family!”

What followed was a kind of cultural exchange that many teachers could profit from, for they needed to be honest about this with parents. Do not code it over with words like “tolerance” because tolerance is a poor substitute for acceptance, understanding and celebrating individuality + commonality.

Mrs. Lurie, the principal of this East Harlem elementary school, was herself native born Puerto Rican. Freely and legally selected by decentralized, District 4 Community School Board, she took her Puerto Rican school parents and her Italian school parents into an active partnership in behalf of every child’s education. Quite an accomplishment! One would think the Board of Education and NYC would rejoice at such a bridging of rich cultural differences. But Oh No! 

Because this Puerto Rican woman principal was quickly replaced with a white non-Hispanic man who claimed he was the victim of reverse discrimination. He charged that he had been passed over for the principalship by a heavily Puerto Rican community school board and he claimed the post was rightfully and “white fully” his. The argument went that his qualifications were superior to Mrs. Lurie’s and that she had received the job based solely on ethnic grounds. Lurie actually held the same qualifications as white boy, but never mind. It went all the way to the NYC Commissioner of Human Rights who ruled that the complainer had indeed been passed over because of his national origin( White Land) and Mrs. Lurie was removed. Sound familiar? Sound like 2024?

Eventually, white boy died of old age and his obituary was quick to mention that he took up Financial Advisor as his post educator career path. After all, he had certainly kept his eye on his OWN bottom line. The obit also stated that our human rights victim was always passionate about social justice. But not so passionate that he felt moved to allow legally selected Principal Lurie to lead her Puerto Rican and Italian school parents in a classroom movement squarely centered on children.

And so we continued to cripple youth and destroy their spirits and their hungry minds. It was how the “system” worked. That was how the cookie crumbled in White Land. 

The 1970’s Open Corridors program meant opening minds and buildings to parent participation and to new ways of doing things. Black and Brown students marginalized, alienated and diminished by centralized, bigoted pedagogy finally stood a chance of being seen and nurtured. But there were many company men and women who were having none of it. They were comfortable with the old way of “doing business”. They put in their years, got the correct credentials, kissed the appropriate asses and believed themselves ENTITLED to a position of personal preference, current liberating movement be damned.

White boy and his friends had spent decades presiding over East Harlem schools, steering them to the widely regarded designation of Worst Ever! They were dead last on standardized reading tests, plagued with chronic absenteeism, raging gang violence, drug deals in the boy’s bathroom. A regular Blackboard Jungle. This was the proud legacy, the manufactured crisis that the “victims” of reverse discrimination wished to maintain.

When Elwyn S. Richardson first came to New Zealand’s Oruaiti School he stopped to examine the green clays in the neighboring creek beds. One day he and his students found a seam of grey clay that they thought looked promising so they dug and carried several loads back to an outdoor patio area. They watered it, chopped it and worked it with hands and feet and finally got it into a workable consistency.

Next came a series of clay samples brought from home on a regular basis for testing and selecting. One day a boy named Rex wheeled his mother’s wheelbarrow one mile up the valley to the school loaded with bricks to make a kiln.

“The clay we used in the first months was not good. So we used the scientific method to solve the problem. We dried some pieces rapidly in the stove and these all cracked badly. Those that were sun-dried also cracked but those which were placed in the dark of the store room cupboard and dried slowly did not crack at all. We found that bottoms cracked unless we turned the pots early in the process of drying.”

The children at this school were real people to their teacher and to each other. Coronavirus could not distance nor defeat them because the vaccine against infectious anomie was their creative community. They were not reduced to social security numbers or login ID’s. Together everyone opened up to the immediate world, examining and uncovering it as if they had recently arrived from some other dimension. And maybe they had. Fresh eyes that fell in love with the work undertaken.

There was a romance involving GRASS and here is how Clifton-10 years expressed it. “I saw the clip of the grass gently move. the long dry wind, bending ticklish grass. The sticky heat of the paspallum walk. The mown grass breath of the wind. The sharp needle of the prickly gorse sticking into grass tops. They sat and watched the blinking sheep and the long bent grass waves. The long silent grass blows over the hill. On the top of the hill is the grass bending over like me bowing.“

George Joseph Cons was a dreamer. He was a man who said NO to combat during WWI. As you might imagine, that did not go over well and he was sent to prison for awhile, a farm prison where he grew food for the war effort. When it was all over he was not the favorite candidate for a teaching job in many districts but he made his way through the patriotic pettiness and ended up at Goldsmiths College University of London.

Postman As Curriculum

There he went into neighborhood schools where the children of working people were enrolled and brought the immediate community into classrooms. Students met their parents and their neighbors in an entirely heightened light. Suddenly the postman, a dustman, a sewer man or a fireman became the subject for intense and respected study. No one was ashamed to say, “My Mum is a washerwoman.” That mother was standing at the front of the class delivering a lecture and fielding questions on the business of send out laundry.

G.J. Cons and Catherine Fletcher wrote a book about their educational experiment and entitled it, ACTUALITY IN SCHOOL. A favorite section is the Q&A session with Mr. W. the local postman. It went something like this.

Please sir, when you’re going up the street and can’t see the numbers, what do you do? We have a little electric lamp which we switch on when we need to.

There is a man who lives in Palestine, who’s a great friend of my father and my father sends him letters. How would he get them? They would be sorted at the office and put into the “foreign section” of the General Post Office. There, there are sorting boxes for all parts of the world. Your father’s letter is put in the Palestine division.

Not only did this classroom meet with their postman, they also visited the sorting office where he worked. At age 9 and 10 they stayed in that area for over one hour, curious about and interested in all that transpired. On two different Thursday afternoons these youth boarded the city tram and arrived at the G.P.O. St. Martin Lee Grand for a proper look-see. As many of us have experienced as center city teachers, these kids had no idea that the big river running right before their eyes was a tributary known as The Thames. A free tram opened their lives up to an entirely new waterway subject of study which they could share with their impoverished families on a weekend jaunt.

Cons got hold of some documentary films to further expand post office investigations. One of his favorites was entitled “Night Mail”. Porters at Crewe are seen slinging giant mailbags into the train. The train steams through the Midlands, past factories and across the lowlands of Scotland, finally arriving in the misty morning at Edinburgh filled with letters and parcels of all description. Very visual.

But Mr. Cons and Ms. Fletcher were after something much more important than a deep, cognitive understanding of the postal system. As a man who said NO to war, he was a lover of peace, community, prosperity and sympathy. Yes, sympathy or empathy or whatever else one might call it. He wanted the children and their teacher to see that the postman lived a life of drama, holding his breath until a parcel recipient made it to the front door in time for a hand-off. Dashing into the shelter of a building, a tree or a storefront just as a drenching rain broke out. Losing a registered letter full of money and having to solve the mystery of where it went and how to retrieve it. This postman was a man of intelligence and energy and bravery and as a result of this big group inquiry, the world was once again endowed with delight, value and significance.

This is what real teachers do. They use curriculum to develop civic consciousness. They broaden individual worlds so people feel alive and excited in their place of existence. No one sleep walks through life or bounces about in a cocoon, careening off others, believing they are the only ones in the universe. No caste system is erected or maintained in which postmen and trash men and sewer men or washerwoman or lunchroom woman don’t count as citizens or as intellects. What we do matters and other human beings matter and we are the better for it, all thanks to a real teacher.

We do not stand back and watch a monster walk into the White House, claiming it as his own simply because he feels the need for power. We do not permit tyranny to run rampant like a contagious infection through a populace, filling them with fear and frustration. We need smart, active citizenship and this is how George Joseph Cons envisioned it happening in schools.