Cornville’s Desert Star Community School teacher Frank Plucker has watched his classroom grow from eager and precocious first-graders to perhaps even more eager and precocious third-graders. He has every intention to stick around until they graduate from eighth grade.
“You develop a relationship with the students,” Plucker said, adding that his goal is to ensure that his students become “ethical, thinking human beings who are able to make their own decisions — to be truly free individuals.”
Plucker helped establish the oldest public Waldorf-inspired charter school in the U.S., the Yuba River Charter School in Nevada City, Calif. As a result, he has had the experience to speak about the ways in which forming bonds helps children grow into fantastic students and citizens.
The numbers speak for themselves: At 199 students, the eight-classroom K-8 school is near maxed-out for space. Less than 10 years after opening in 2007, nearly every classroom is full, and many have a waiting list.
According to Plucker, the demand reflects the value Desert Star brings to the community. “We serve a pretty challenged population, socioeconomically,” he said, adding that 66 percent of the student population is eligible for free and reduced lunches.
As a state-registered charter school, Desert Star charges no fees for instruction.
“That’s why I work here,” Plucker said. “If it weren’t free, these kids would never be able to afford this level of instruction.”
The biggest appeal of a Waldorf-inspired school, Plucker explained, is the way in which the curriculum centers around art. As a result, however, some people believe that Waldorf-inspired schools are not academically rigorous.
“Students are required to take the same standardized tests as those in district schools,” Plucker said. “And by the middle school years, we tend to do better on those tests.”
Despite the art-based teaching philosophy — which also emphasized not teaching children lessons until they are developmentally mature enough to handle those lessons — Plucker said that Desert Star is not focused on producing artists.
“The goal is to educate the whole person …. And we expect pretty high quality work by the third grade.”
Experiential learning is a big part of what Desert Star does, urging students to not only make their own textbooks but to take lessons from their studies and apply them to their lives outside of school, even to the point of staying up late to see the stars for their astronomy class.
“The sciences, in particular, are experiential as much as they are sitting at a desk reading and writing.”
Plucker said the school has plans to expand soon: In the next year, Desert Star will be building an approximately 6,000-square-foot multi-purpose building for their own use and the community’s.
