Just like Saint Louis Sudbury School students, adults in our community enjoy learning, being curious, and connecting with others! During our summer break, Saint Louis Sudbury School staff, board, and volunteers celebrated the thinking and planning time we had away from the regular school day to take a fresh look on the upcoming school year. We are excited to kick off our 2025-2026 school year on Tuesday, September 2!

Here are some activities that we did this summer to help spark new ideas and support our entire learning community this school year:

* We attended the Alternative Education Resource Organization conference in New Hampshire and had incredible conversations with colleagues from Macomber Center, Embark Center for Self-Directed Education, Sudbury Valley School, Not Back to School Camp, and Play Mountain Place and heard talks from Pat Farenga and Peter Gray. Read our blog post on this experience!

* We talked with school and nonprofit organization colleagues at MAP St. Louis, Fort Worth Sudbury, Raritan Learning Cooperative, The Ethical Society of St. Louis, Bread and Roses Missouri, Tower Grove Farmers’ Market, River City Outdoors, Embark Center, The Clearwater School, MADE Makerspace, St. Louis Public Library, and Sudbury International. We can’t wait to talk with Saint Louis Sudbury School students and families about some potential activities and event ideas that came out of these conversations.

* We enjoyed meeting with Intersect Arts Center’s incredible staff to find new ways we can collaborate.

* We learned so much from Blue Mesa Creative and improved our google business profile, how we show up in searches, and backend elements of our web site.

* Sudbury staff member, Jennifer, talked with writer and podcaster Kerry McDonald and was featured in Kerry’s article on forbes.com.

* We met with St. Louis teaching artists and education entrepreneurs.

* We talked with new donors and received our largest individual cash gift in our school’s history!

* We spent time together with current families at park meetups, picnics, and a fun volunteer session at the St. Louis Area Foodbank.

* We joined the planning committee for Sudbury International’s new virtual book club! More details to come.

* We kept our garden at school thriving over the summer so we can continue to enjoy fresh veggies this fall. Sudbury families and staff worked together to water, weed, trim (our pumpkin vines are VERY happy), and harvest kale, basil, tomatoes, peppers, and more.

* We attended the Sudbury Schools Virtual Conference which was organized by The Open School in California. Over 50 attendees from 25 schools and 5 different countries participated! We had discussions about building community and traditions, how AI is changing education, supporting teens for life after Sudbury, neurodiversity and communication, democracy in our schools, accountability systems, attracting new families, and much more.

* We read and listened to many resources over the summer including: The End of Education As We Know It: Regenerative Learning for Complex Times by Ida Rose Florez; The Parent’s Handbook to Unschooling Yourself by Esther Jones; The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better by Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop; The Self-Driven Child: The Science and Sense of Giving Your Kids More Control Over Their Lives by William Stixrud and Ned Johnson; the work of The Rithm Project; Joyful Learning by Kerry McDonald; and many more!

* We connected with new families who learned about us from our recent features with Children’s Education Alliance of Missouri, forbes.com, and St. Louis Magazine.

* We met with Saint Louis Sudbury School board members about financial sustainability, our bylaws, and what to prioritize this year.

* We kept in touch with current Saint Louis Sudbury School families and heard about some of the fun learning experiences their kids were having this summer including stringing guitars, going fishing, building dreamcatchers, attending an art program out of state, going on road trips, working, and more. Sudbury staff will check in with students the first week of school to see if they want to continue any of their summer projects or interests at Sudbury this fall.

Maybe that wasn’t much of a “real” break this summer… but we were grateful for a bit more time and space to reimagine the reimagining of education at Sudbury!