ADAPT 2020-2021

Vashon Green School will continue to provide primary school education (ages 5-12) for the 2020-21 school year. As we address the best way forward for this year in the context of covid-19, we will continue to incorporate current research, recommendations from local government and public health and safety experts to adapt to an ever-changing educational and social environment.

In response to WA State public health COVID-19 protocol, Vashon Green School has transformed the 7-acre campus to be an entirely outdoor youth development program. We are planning on being open Monday-Thursday, 9am-3pm. Participants will be organized into three small groups of 9 or fewer youth per mentor. The campus will be divided into three separate zones. Each group will have its own separate area with covered, open-work spaces and handwashing stations. Children will be required to wear cloth face coverings and to maintain physical distance. Daily temperature taking at the beginning of each day, documenting and graphing health data, regular hand-washing, responsibility for one’s own gear and personal supplies will not only be part of our daily practices but they will be integrated into a public health curriculum.

Since 2007 we have been teaching outdoor education combined with classroom work in indoor structures to provide creative applications of lessons within lessons and intersections of content both planned and magically spontaneous. VGS is uniquely poised to offer a fully outdoor primary school that continues to provide extended academic learning, Spanish fusion, individual tutoring sessions and outdoor education. VGS is committed to creating experiences that help youth develop social, emotional, physical, and cognitive abilities, including the specific ways that relate to living and learning through a pandemic.

We are being challenged to adapt and evolve. The seriousness of the public health crisis we are facing, the inequity of power and resources being revealed and looming political chaos that surrounds us all add up to an urgent foundational imbalance. At VGS, we believe we need to be teaching, learning and evolving in real time in order to navigate the contemporary challenges of our world with our children and with each other. All of this profoundly informs our ideas for this year.

A recent podcast by Michael Meade resonates with the current VGS philosophy. In it he asks, “How can we reimagine education in the midst of the pandemic? …Something is trying to awaken in us [a] reimagining [of] what education is and what it is for. If the world is going to continue to be so uncertain and so full of radical change, then the education of students who have to live and find ways to prosper in that world have to change as well.” —Living Myth, Michael Meade, August 5, Episode 187.

Vashon Green School is currently full. For information about the wait list for youth ages 5-12, please email us at vashongreenschool@gmail.com.