Saint Louis Sudbury School: What are we all about?
The Essentials
Saint Louis Sudbury School is a nonprofit Self-Directed Education learning community located inside a vibrant arts center located in South City. Students ages 5 to 18 enjoy everyday participation in self-chosen activities, governance of the school, and nurturing our school community life.
The school does not have formal grades, testing, or homework and does not separate students by age. Age mixing offers opportunities for anyone to be a teacher or learner, practice in communicating with, interacting with, and respecting people of different ages.
Saint Louis Sudbury School is a private school and tuition based. The school has full-time and part-time enrollment options, ranging from 2 to 5 days a week.
Financial assistance options include MOScholars, ACE Scholarships, and Saint Louis Sudbury School Tuition Assistance, all of which are based on specific requirements such as having an IEP and/or demonstrating financial need.
Experienced Sudbury staff and adult volunteers are facilitators or guides who offer students support with resources, safety, planning, interpersonal conflict resolution, and feedback. They are not traditional teachers, but can teach in their content areas. Sudbury staff are largely responsible for administrative responsibilities related to the running of the school, offering school wide community support, and providing prompt and clear family communication.
Driven by student interest and initiative, Sudbury also has regular teaching artists in ceramics, woodshop, and cooking; guest workshop teachers; and local community partners who share their expertise and interests with students.
Although the school day is largely filled with students’ self-chosen activities, regularly scheduled events throughout the week include Pop-In (morning meeting), School Meeting, Restoration Committee meetings (conflict resolution), ceramics, woodshop, cooking, check-in meetings with staff, math meetup, gardening, and discussion club.
Saint Louis Sudbury School students and staff organize field trips 2-3 times a month based on student interests, budget, and transportation needs and organize more frequent trips to area businesses for life skills experiences.
Sudbury students have the option to participate in a diploma process which requires leadership on committees, a capstone project or a reflection paper, a presentation, and development of a transcript. Students can request support from staff on HiSET or GED study, dual enrollment at St. Louis Community College, and researching and/or applying to apprenticeship programs, trade school, or college applications, and more.
Young people who tend to thrive in the Saint Louis Sudbury School environment:
Are able to keep themselves and others safe
Have supportive caregivers who are aligned with the Sudbury school model and have the capacity and interest to partner with the school staff in their child’s journey
Demonstrate growing independence
Are able to practice honesty and responsibility
Are able to try new things and ask questions
Life is Learning and Learning is Life
Saint Louis Sudbury School practices Self-Directed Education (SDE) as defined by the Alliance for Self-Directed Education. SDE is education that derives from self-chosen activities and life experiences of the learner, whether or not those activities were chosen deliberately for the purpose of education.
At Sudbury, education is viewed as everything students come to know in order to live their lives. Learning happens through living. At Sudbury, this may look like deliberate learning through math meetups, art or cooking classes, workshops about financial literacy or plant propagation, AND it may look like facilitating conflict resolution meetings, debating new rules or policies, helping a friend through a challenging moment, researching and planning a budget for a project you want to do, being near a peer who is exploring lizards and then becoming interested, going to a science center with no lesson plan and discovering an interest in astronomy, wanting to contact your parent during the school day because you’re upset but then figuring it out on your own, and much more.
Seeing learning intertwined with living life fosters lifelong curiosity, wonder, intrinsic motivation, respect for others, a playful mindset, self-awareness, resilience, and self-initiative.
Grounded in History, Knowledge, and Collaboration
Saint Louis Sudbury School was founded in 2019. Our school is inspired by successful Self-Directed Education schools including Summerhill School in the UK (founded in 1921), Sudbury Valley School in Massachusetts (founded in 1968), The Circle School in Pennsylvania, Alpine Valley School in Colorado, Miami Sudbury School in Florida, Arts & Ideas Sudbury School in Maryland, Zena Democratic School in New York, The Open School in California, and Fairhaven in Maryland. The Sudbury model school and inspired schools generally offer Self-Directed Education, a democratically governed school, age-mixing, town-hall format School Meeting, and Judicial or Restoration Committee for conflict resolution.
The development of Saint Louis Sudbury School’s practices and school culture was largely inspired by research and writings by Peter Gray, John Holt, Pat Farenga, Daniel Greenberg, A.S. Neill, Gina Riley, Naomi Fisher, Christel Hartkamp-Bakker, Jim Reitmulder, Marshall B. Rosenberg, Esther Jones, Cas Holman, Ida Rose Florez, and more.
Saint Louis Sudbury School staff are in regular contact and collaboration with other Sudbury inspired schools around the world, Sudbury International, Alliance for Self-Directed Education, and Alternative Education Resource Organization. These connections have deepened and diversified Sudbury staff’s knowledge of the Self-Directed Education field and have opened up new opportunities for Sudbury students and staff.
Our Community
Saint Louis Sudbury School’s dynamic and welcoming community consists of students, staff, volunteers, board members, teaching artists, donors, and community partners.
Through family gatherings, meetings, special events, open houses, and regular communication via a private Sudbury families Facebook page and newsletters, members of the Saint Louis Sudbury School community respect and value each other.
Our community understands that every single person’s actions play an important role in making our nonprofit microschool a viable success. For parents, this may look like picking up your child on time, carpooling with other families, bringing juice to a picnic, teaching kids how to make scones at school, driving on a field trip, donating to a fundraiser, telling all your friends about Sudbury, responding promptly to a staff email, showing up for family gatherings, sharing kudos or concerns with staff, and more.
Family Life
One of the greatest benefits of having a child at Saint Louis Sudbury School is that most of our families’ views on what a childhood “should” look like shifts. At Saint Louis Sudbury School, students and their families do not have to experience conventional school practices or experiences of checking off all the boxes, hitting arbitrary milestones, completing hours of homework after a full day of school, dealing with the stress of intense extra-curricular activities, managing a schedule of frequent parent teacher conferences and communications (hello parents of neurodivergent children), managing the stress of rigid attendance expectations, and facing the pressure of always being productive and “getting ahead.”
Being a part of Saint Louis Sudbury School means that parents get to prioritize developing a healthy and strong relationship with their child, enjoy evenings and weekends as a family, and see their child become a better human as they have the time and space at Sudbury and at home to figure out who they are and what a good life might mean for them. Sudbury parents say, “I got my kid back,” “My child has a childhood now,” and “His new outlook on life and maturity since being at Sudbury has made me a better person.”
““Sudbury trusts students to trust themselves.” ”
Our Mission
We believe that children are born with the drive and skills to create a meaningful and successful life and learn best when given the opportunity to initiate and develop learning on their own. Within a self-governing democracy, our school community protects, respects, and trusts the autonomy of young people.
Our VISIOn
Saint Louis Sudbury School envisions that all young people in the St. Louis region have access to a unique educational choice—one that integrates self-directed learning, innate curiosity, trust, and responsibility within a supportive and thriving democratic community.
HOW IT WORKS
Age-Mixing
While most schools segregate students based on age, Sudbury students freely mingle. Instead of being assigned to a class or group, Sudbury students have free access to solitude, small groups, large groups, younger students, older students, and adults within the school and broader community. We see Saint Louis Sudbury School teenagers engaging in nurturing and playful behavior with our younger students. The older students get to be meaningful role models in a way that isn’t possible in conventional, age-divided schools. We see students interacting with the knowledge, skills, and development levels that are close enough to their own while also challenging themselves to play and learn from people of different ages. It’s not unusual for a 9-year-old to teach something to a 17-year-old and vice versa!
Democracy
”The point of school meeting is to inform people what’s happening for the day, have discussions to talk about school issues, and make motions to get things done.” — Saint Louis Sudbury School Student
Sudbury schools truly belong to the students and staff. Two times a week, students and staff are invited to attend the School Meeting, where all big and small decisions are made collaboratively. This includes proposing and planning field trips, figuring out ways to help problem solve with students in a larger group, adjusting and approving the school budget, creating and amending school rules, approving volunteers, making recommendations to the Board of Directors, proposing possible guest instructors and classes, and more. This is where students learn what it takes to listen, consider the needs of their school’s community, be informed, ask questions, advocate for causes, negotiate, and balance personal responsibility with that of others. Every person, regardless of age, gets one vote.
Restoration Committee
When anyone at school (student or adult) struggles with a school rule or policy, a School Meeting Member can write a support slip which goes to our Restoration Committee. This elected committee, comprised of students and advisors (staff members), helps students problem solve concerning situations and personal conflicts. The goal of these meetings is not a punitive or consequence based, but rather to support one another so that we can create a community that we all want to be a part of and one that can be a respectful, inviting, and fun place to be. Elements of Non-Violent Communication and empathy strategies are practiced by all in these productive meetings.
Self-Directed Education
Sudbury students are not obligated to follow any specific curriculum or bell schedule. Their time is their own. For many, this looks like a lot of unstructured play! It also looks like passionate investigation of diverse subjects, driven by genuine curiosity. It often means sharing passions with each other in casual conversation. There is no “typical day” in a Sudbury school.
Sudbury students learn what they want, when they want, with whom they want, for as long as they want, to the depth of their interests, in the way that best suits them. Activities are allowed as long as they are deemed respectful, responsible, and reasonable by School Meeting members.
HOURS
School hours are 8:30 am to 3:15 pm, Monday through Friday. Students may arrive anytime between 8:30 am and 10 am.
Students are not required to be at school the entire day. Minimum attendance is 5 hours per day, with students attending 4-5 days a week or 2-3 days per week.
LUNCH/SNACKS
We do not provide meals. Students bring their own lunches and snacks, and are able to eat whenever they’re hungry. They are responsible for preparing food and cleaning up after themselves, and staff, volunteers, and students are happy to teach these skills if people want to learn! Students often vote to spend money from their School Meeting budget to prepare family-style meals or buy snacks for the school. We share the building’s commercial kitchen with artists and community programs, so cleaning up from cooking is a skill that is practiced before students are set free in the kitchen. Food preparation and eating is not rushed at Saint Louis Sudbury School—it is celebrated! Literacy, math, logic, chemistry, nutrition, cultural competency, interpersonal skills, and respect for shared space can all be practiced during solo or group food preparation.
ORGANIZATION
Saint Louis Sudbury School is a private school and 501(c)3 nonprofit corporation in the state of Missouri.