Welcome to VGS
Our mission: Vashon Green School is a learning community, rooted in emotional literacy, environmental awareness, and social justice. We provide young people with the raw material to build a strong foundation.
Our aim is to provide a learning environment where:
• children’s unique ways of knowing are honored
• connections to each other, humanity and the natural world deepen
• sustainable solutions grow
• engaged global citizens are inspired.
Vashon Green School embraces sustainable, progressive, ground-breaking educational opportunities. We offer an elementary academic curriculum rooted in the theory of multiple intelligences—recognizing each individual possesses a unique blend of different ways of thinking, learning, sensing and expressing. VGS engages each child’s unique gifts and seeks to identify and incorporate different learning modality strengths. When children feel empowered in their strengths they gain the courage and confidence to embrace challenges.
During years of teaching diverse populations of students, Dana Schuerholz, lead instructor at VGS observed that more conventional learners, those who excel at linguistic and logical intelligence, thrive in a collaborative living classroom. And students who excel primarily in non-conventional learning environments are empowered in ways that uniquely meet their needs and creativity.
Amy Mercer, a certified dyslexia specialist and diagnostician, is the Vashon Green School reading and writing specialist. She works with each student individually twice a week.
As a multi-age, independent primary school for students ages 5–11 (K-5), Vashon Green School creates a vibrant, lively, forum for students to discover, invent, create, learn and teach. On 7 acres of farm and woodland, the multitude of learning environments inside around tables as well as outside “classrooms” include: math while seeding, planting, and harvesting in the field and greenhouse, science around wetlands with the ducks and macro-invertebrates, art and poetry in the pasture with chickens and sheep, anatomy and micro-biomes in the barn with the goats and perma-culture design projects with plants. A small teacher/student ratio and broad range of thematic activities integrates visual, auditory, kinesthetic, logical and linguistic learning modalities.
"Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons. It is to grow in the open air and eat and sleep with the earth." - Walt Whitman