albany free school

Founded in 1969 by Mary Leue, the Albany Free School is the oldest inner-city independent alternative school in the United States. It all began when Mary’s ten-year-old son became so miserable in one of Albany’s better public schools that he asked his mother if she would teach him at home instead. Soon three of Mark’s also-suffering friends joined in and with that a little school was born. ……..Suddenly, four students became seven, two more teachers climbed aboard, and the need for a building led the group to a dilapidated inner city church.

The move accomplished two things: they could afford the $100 a month rent and the location ensured that the school would be racially and socio-economically diverse. What followed was a wild and tumultuous year, with parents battling over educational philosophy and practice, with kids from opposite ends of the spectrum thrashing out their own issues, and with several city departments (building, fire, and education) vying to shut down this radical storefront institution.

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A fire during the following summer forced the school to seek a new home. This time they were able to buy an old parochial school building on a different edge of the same neighborhood. Over the next several years Mary was also able to acquire seven other run-down buildings on the block for an average of $2,000 each. Here Mary was acting on the advice of Jonathan Kozol, who strongly advocated that free schools develop some sort of business enterprise so that they wouldn’t be tuition dependent and therefore accessible only to middle-class children.

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Because the pay was miniscule, a number of the teachers were attempting to live together semi-communally in school-owned housing. 

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By the late-seventies a core group of committed staff had coalesced and began putting down roots by buying their own homes on the block for the same low prices that Mary had paid for the Free School buildings. Already equipped with the necessary rehabilitation skills and tools that they had acquired while fixing up the school buildings, they devised a cooperative system for helping each other with their houses. At the same time teachers started to have children of their own and also to share childrearing responsibilities. The high level of cooperation resulted in a deepening sense of connection and gradually led the group to begin referring to itself as “the Free School community.”

With the school on a firm footing, Mary conceived a number of satellite projects aimed at addressing the needs of community members. One she dubbed the “Money Game,” which is part credit union and part cooperative investment group. Members are able to earn a much higher return by pooling their money and can also utilize the fund’s assets to make loans to each other at much lower interest rates. Partially in response to the arrival of so many community babies, Mary, with assistance from Betsy Mercogliano, founded the Family Life Center in order to offer perinatal support to pregnant couples, parenting support to parents of young children, and to teach self-help medical care. The center had an immediate synergistic effect on the school and the community, with the outreach services of the center drawing in many new families. The Family Life Center is still thriving today serving families in search of alternatives to the current medical models of care. Later, Mary and Nancy Ost, who had previously run a natural foods store in Albany, started up a coop in the basement of the Family Life Center building, providing easy access to organic foods at wholesale cost. At the same time several community families collaborated on a small organic farm with goats, chickens, honeybees and large gardens on nearly an acre of vacant land on the block that they purchased together.

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At present, the school’s enrollment stands at about sixty-five, with approximately sixty people or so making up the Free School community.

Find much more (ie: learnings over the years) via In Defense of Childhood, Chris Mercogliano

ie: via Chris, nov 2014, for Albany’s 45 anniversary..

http://www.chrismercogliano.com/still-on-a-shoestring/

I’m sure if anyone had asked her, that reporter would’ve said there was no way the school’s doors would still be open in the year 2014. But she was as wrong as A.S. Neill was in the very beginning when he told Mary how “daft” she would be to try to implement the Summerhill philosophy with a bunch of inner-city children.

So why is the Albany Free School still hanging around at age 45, with well over half of its students still coming from lower-income families? The answer begins with Mary’s steadfast refusal to take “No” for an answer, and her willingness to make any sacrifice necessary to demonstrate that all children possess their own form of genius as well as the ability to take charge of their own lives.