Issues → September/October 2009 → Features →

Ripton, VT: North Branch School

Starting with two old tables, a woodstove, 10 students

by Tal Birdsey

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Credit: Megan Halsey

I drove out on snowy spring days or in the dark evenings of early summer, to Cornwall and Salisbury and New Haven and Shoreham and Lincoln. I took off my boots in the houses of strangers and asked that they trust this place I might create, which I did not know how to create. I went to see a prospective student, Steve, up on North Branch Road. His mother, Tammi, told me to look for the blue trailer with cars in the yard. There were lots of junk cars--rusted, hoods up and wheels off, a Toyota truck filled with bags of trash. The yard was littered with transmission parts, hubcaps, empty soda bottles, Tonka trucks, deflated soccer balls, retired chainsaws, and piles of seasoned firewood hidden in the overgrowth of jewel-weed. A pen held an assortment of bedraggled, rain-soaked chickens and a belligerent, menacing turkey. A small garden of red and yellow snapdragons marked the way to the door.

I sat at the kitchen table with Tammi, Steve, and his father, Brian. The ashtray between us was filled with ashes and stubbed-out cigarettes. Steve was gangly, with a thin neck, acne, eyes sunk deep in bluish eye sockets, greasy hair hanging over his eyes, his silk basketball shorts hanging down over his knees.

"What subjects do you like?" I asked.

"Uh, history, I guess," he said slowly.

"What history?"

"Um, like the Revolutionary War?"

"What about it do you like?"

"Um, it's like, I don't know, pretty interesting, all the battles and stuff."

"You like sports?"

"Yeah, basketball and baseball."

"Who's your team?"

"The Atlanta Braves."

"Really? Not the Sox?"

"Nah, I like the Braves."

"The Braves are my team," I said, smiling. "I'm from Atlanta."

"Cool."

"Who do you like?" I asked.

"Chipper Jones."

"Sweet. Chipper's awesome."

"Yeah."

"So how was last year in school for you?"

"Uh, not so good." He half laughed. "The teachers didn't like me too much. My math teacher hated me."

"Steve didn't do so well on his report card," said Tammi.

"But he's going to do better, right, Steven?" said Brian, arching an eyebrow from under the bent brim of a Patriots cap.

As I explained the school, it suddenly seemed to be a ludicrous, self-indulgent fantasy of the overly educated. Experiential learning? Piaget and constuctivism? John Keats? W. B. Yeats? I was talking to a family who scuffled by on the stray carpentry job and delivering cordwood. The chances of them wanting to send Steve were slim.

Tammi called the next day. "We'd like him to come to your school," she said.

I looked at my growing class list. My students came from ten towns spread over the county: the eighth graders, Steve, Annie, Najat, Zoe, and Mira-- each from a different school. Sophie, Tico, Nick, and Doug were seventh graders. At the last moment we added Janine, a ninth grader from Pittsford, giving us an age span from eleven to fourteen years old.

Annie, Steve, and Mira, by their accounts, had suffered through miserable seventh grade years. Annie had been relentlessly teased. Steve had failed every class but Language Arts in seventh grade and claimed that if we were to visit the middle school locker room, we could find a large dent on a metal locker door exactly in the shape of his very own head, courtesy of a posse of eighth graders who had used him as a human battering ram.