Xara Garden School

Today was the kind of day where I went to a school fully expecting it to be a joke only to find that it was everything I'm looking for.

Xara Garden School is a teeny, tiny charter by my house that's located in an old church. The garden is a bunch of potted flowers and plants in the parking lot. I drive by it on the days I go to Starbucks before work and see kids frolicking around all the time, always thinking how odd that a "garden" school doesn't have much of a garden.

Wait. Let me back up. I actually first heard about Xara when I was covering an Earth Day festival in Balboa Park and the Xara kids, parents and teachers walked in a parade. They were playing music and giving off such a joyous energy that I wrote the school's name down in my notebook for future reference.

I have heard, though it's not confirmed, that the man who founded Xara is involved in the Burning Man festival. What's Burning Man? I got this from the website: "an annual experiment in temporary community dedicated to radical self-expression and radical self-reliance."

I'm not particularly a Burning Man person, though I'm friends with plenty of people who have gone. But you can pretty much use the above statement to describe Xara, and apparently I'm all about this philosophy in a school environment.

The principal said all the things I wanted to hear, like how kids will learn academics on their own time and they'd rather focus on curiosity and creativity and shift the class where the kids want to take it. This is a school, like Urban Discovery, that doesn't correct spelling at a young age so as to not limit them to use only the words they know. A kid will write extraordinary instead of good, for example, because they don't have to worry about red ink on their papers.

Like Burning Man, they are all about self-reliance and community. They don't raise their hands in some classes, instead they wait until there's a space for their voice. I like the idea of this, but I also worry that if you have a shy child, perhaps their voice will never be heard?

At snack time, I saw a teacher and a little boy sit at a table of food and together they figured out how to divide everything so that it would be fair to the class. They decided on one graham cracker, two apple slices and one spoonfull of almonds. I don't know why, but I loved this.

The thing is that it had like a scatter-brained feeling about it all. The principal, who used the word "man" a few times (as in "these are kids, man") may be a bit too mellow. Plus, they're moving from their current location next year, but they don't know where yet. There's just something I don't totally trust, even though I really want to.

Another thing is that there's not much security. A friend on the tour pointed out that we're used to Jewish schools where there's fences and codes and the like. But another male friend of mine said he was curious about the school for his daughter, stopped by randomly one day and was able to walk right in without question. Do not like.

I honestly went on this tour because I heard so many crazy things about it, how it's a mixture of genius and insane, and I wanted to see for myself. I didn't expect to be so conflicted.