The End Of KRECR And An Unrelated Picture

Here's another view of the Bald Hills, just because it's such a beautiful place. It's unrelated to the rest of the post.

Today was a beautiful fall day. We hiked out to the ocean through the Tolowa Dunes, just one of several amazing ecosystems that surround us. We passed by many different mushrooms on the trail, and way too many of the yellow banana slugs that call this place home, too.

Once we got to the beach, we watched the waves, picked out beautiful rocks and driftwood, got kisses from a dog there with other people, and left as the fog reached back onto the land.

On the hike back to the trail head, we realized that it's almost exactly a year since Michael came back to Del Norte from Pennsylvania. Darcy and I moved back two months earlier, but Michael needed to finish up some work at Delaware Water Gap before coming back to Redwood. In the last year, we have settled back into our community here almost as if we'd never left.

When we left Del Norte for Pennsylvania, the last place we stopped was Darcy's school, the Klamath River Early College of the Redwoods, known as KRECR (pronounced krecker -- with a short 'e'). We had asked Darcy if she wanted to see our empty house or just remember it as we lived there and she chose not to see it empty. So she went to school like any other day and we picked her up in the afternoon and drove out of town with very heavy hearts.

Her classmates and after-school friends had loaded her down with gifts -- unexpected things I needed to find space for during our long drive across the country. She also had a pea shoot to try to keep alive on that drive. (You can see it in a Pennsylvania hotel here.)

Darcy started back at KRECR just three days after flying back from Pennsylvania last year. She had a great year. 

She went back again this year. We had high hopes despite a staff change over, decreased enrollment, and other issues, but KRECR was facing serious hurdles. After weeks of late night discussions, we moved Darcy to a new school this week. It was a difficult decision, one we didn't make lightly, and one that created a lot of sadness and guilt in our family. We wanted to support the school. We tried to hold on during a difficult transition. In the end, we just couldn't let Darcy watch her school fall apart around her any more.

For most of this week, I had put away the sadness. My last three minute encounter at KRECR on Darcy's last day had made me so angry that I hardened my heart to the school's troubles and moved on with my life. The anger was justified, but the cause isn't important now.

Yesterday, KRECR announced that it will close after December 19th. There are simply not enough students left to maintain the school. At first, even hearing this, knowing that a dear friend's heart would be breaking with this news, I couldn't feel sad about it because of those last three minutes.

But truly, KRECR is bigger than my last encounter and it's bigger and better than this shortened school year. It was started with love to bring an alternative to this community, one focused on place and culture. It's goals were to help every child thrive at their own pace, to instill a dream of college in a community where that is so often not the dream, to use restorative justice to resolve conflicts in a more meaningful way than suspensions and expulsions allow, and to create a school that honored this place and the people who have lived here since time immemorial.

We gained two new school board members in this week's election. Neither of them, based on the non-partisan debate I attended, seem likely to support the kind of learning environment we valued at KRECR. It would be nice to think that we could bring some of what we loved about our school to the larger school district. In very small ways, maybe we can. But a larger overhaul of the system will require that all parents stand up and demand change and put tremendous pressure on the school board. 

Darcy was elected last month to be KRECR's school historian. Now that it is closing, it is up to all of us who loved the school to make sure its legacy is not judged by its last few months.