Welcome to the Sudbury in Depth series, where we take a deep dive into the philosophy and practice of the Sudbury model. Each episode, 3-4 staff members from different schools will share their perspectives and experiences on a topic. This time, we'll be discussing what democracy means in Sudbury.

Greg: The students run the school. The student's voice has the ultimate say, even if that say is imperfect.

Caroline: When we first started, we would talk about, hey, we're a democratic school. Isn't that great! Just assuming, we live in a democratic country, I kind of thought that was a no brainer. That showed we're able to practice the governance and mirror, hopefully in a better way, a more egalitarian way, a more equitable way, our country, our local governments, all of the levels. We as a school are mirroring that. So, what a great civics lesson, what a great lesson in government!

I remember taking a field trip to our state capital once. And we sat in on a session and it felt very familiar. The students were like, oh yeah, yeah! They make motions... The language felt familiar to them.

Christen: I think democracy is key because agency is key in a Sudbury school. This is such a unique place right now where young people have a voice and a choice.

Greg: Specifically my version of why democracy matters is because democracy is messy. We need the students to actually own the decisions and to get it wrong. And then to see that if they got it wrong, it's reworkable. At the end of an experience in a Sudbury school, students need to be comfortable being full members of a society where not everything makes sense, and not everything is coherent, and everything that they do isn't going to just work out with a bow on it. And they shouldn't be afraid of that. They should be ready to embrace that and move forward
knowing that we're going to do the best we can now, and we'll just fix the stuff that doesn't work later.

Larry: On the printed agenda for the School Meeting, there will be a proposal. Larry moves to change this rule. And I will explain why I think it's needed, and then it's opened up to everyone else to discuss. And this is obviously done through the Robert's Rules of Order procedure. And then at the first reading it's left alone. A week later it comes back in second readings to be heard discussed and potentially voted on.

Now in the intervening week, oftentimes there's a lot of discussion about it. A lot of times I will ask people's opinion. If I think that that rule change is going to affect somebody's liberty personally, I'm going to go to them and say, hey, I'm making this motion at School Meeting. It's going to adjust a certain rule. What do you think about it? Or they might come up to me and say, Larry, I heard you're doing such and such at School Meeting, tell me more. And so there's a lot of back and forth that goes on outside of School Meeting.

Caroline: We've of course adjusted over the years. We used to have more bureaucratic or formalized structures, where you might make a motion and then it has to wait a week and it gets another reading. And I think where we've landed today is that simplicity is the best. Someone can make a motion, it can be passed that day, and then it becomes law, like immediately.

It's not just about getting things done, but it's also a forum to hear each other out, to think about things. "I'm worried about screen time, is anyone else concerned about that?" So School Meeting also is a place to discuss things.

Larry: I think one of the the key components of the Sudbury model is that I have one vote. A 5-year-old has one vote. A 70-year-old has one vote.

Christen: It can look lots of different ways. When we started we were a majority vote democracy. In in our evolving as a community, we talked about moving to be a consensus decision making body. And some students said, Oh my gosh, that's going to take forever for everyone to agree. It's just faster to count the yes votes and the no votes. And what if you have one person that's just planning to stink the whole thing up, like "I'm never going to agree to anything."

These are all understandable and valid concerns. My own experience being a part of other communities that had used consensus was that it was actually oftentimes faster, and really gave everyone much more a feeling of voice. That it wasn't just, "I'm in the minority so I'm never going to get this vote passed." But that even in the minority their voice was valid.

And so we voted by majority vote (because that was our system at the time) to become a consensus decision making democracy. And we've seen since moving to that, decisions actually do work pretty fast.

This is our elaborate system: Thumbs up for "I agree," thumbs down for "I disagree," or thumbs sideways for "I don't really have any strong feelings, I'm neutral." And so the student who's facilitating the meeting can say, Where are people at? And everyone can do this visually and pretty simply.

And whoever is thumbs down, the facilitator can say, What are you thinking? What parts of this do you object to, and what would you suggest instead? And this is part of our job—if they need support or scaffolding. Maybe they don't like it but they're afraid to say why. We can say, Do you want to tell me and I can communicate that to the meeting if you'd like. And sometimes they'll say yes, I just I don't like this part. I'll say, She doesn't like this part. And then the group can say, Okay, maybe we can change that part. If we change that part are you okay? "Yes." Okay great. So we've got the proposal, we've changed this part, now how is everyone feeling about the proposal? And we've got thumbs up or thumbs neutral—I'm great, or I can live with it, I don't care. And then we move on.

And so again I think it's been a lot faster, and has allowed for actually more productive dissent, because people can say, I don't like this part. But they do have to communicate what they would like instead. They can't just be like, I'm going to vote no on everything and nothing's going to happen.

Larry: It is also true that democracy means that 51% of a population can vote to violate the liberty of 49% of the population. And I think if if majority rule is your idea of democracy, then I would not be in the camp of saying that the school is a democratic school. Ultimately a school like ours must protect the minority. It must protect the smallest number of people. Which obviously the smallest number is one. There has to be either a written document, or a very strong ethos, that the individual has the right to live their lives the way they see fit. And if there's any constraint on that on their liberty, it must be done with the greatest care, the greatest amount of deliberation, to make sure that the individual is still free to do what they want.

Greg: We've tried different things in order to make sure that it wasn't the staff just operating as a benevolent oligarchy. When we first reopened, we passed a quorum rule that said we have to have at least two student votes for every staff vote for it to be a legitimate decision. Our students tried that for most of a year, and voted it out because—I'll paraphrase—they wanted the right not to care. So there are certain things that they just don't want to vote on. They don't care and they want to be able to move on. So it's really up to the chair of School Meeting to figure out which things are procedural and don't really need a lot of input, and which things are important to the fabric of who we are as a school, and we want to maybe even pause and go rally all the students that might have an interest in the topic and make sure they get to the meeting.

Caroline: We do have a mandatory participation part of School Meeting. Students and staff are required to be on the School Meeting team probably two or three times a year.

Christen: Sometimes we have meetings that everyone is asked to attend because it affects the whole community. Or we need buy-in and input from everyone in the community. Oftentimes it's about community culture things. For example when we moved from JC to RJC. When we want to talk about larger things that affect everyone, we want everyone's input.

Caroline: In addition to School Meeting, our other structure is Judicial Committee or JC. JC is where we figure out when the rules have been broken, we figure out as a community how to make things better.

There are different smaller organizations that we call corporations. Corporations can have their own budget. So Art Corporation isn't having to go to School Meeting if they need new markers. Or they can they have their own budget and they can make decisions within their meetings.

Students can take roles of leadership and responsibility by running for different clerkships. Certainly there is a JC Clerk, a Judicial Committee Clerk, and a School Meeting Clerk. And students have had those clerkships for a number of years now. Not in our early years, but since we have become more established, and the culture is more established, those have pretty much been student-inhabited clerkships. There are a couple of clerkships that are not open to students: Medical Clerk, Parent Relations Clerks, those sorts of things which are left to adults.

Larry: The School Meeting is the ultimate authority for the daily operation of the running of the school. And the School Meeting oftentimes delegates specific tasks or areas of responsibility
to an individual, which we call a clerk, or a group, which we call a committee.

For example, at Alpine Valley School we have an Aesthetics and Use Committee, and that committee is made up of students and staff. So when an issue comes up, let's say somebody wants to rearrange a room in a significant way. They want to take the couches out and put something else in the room. So the Aesthetics and Use Committee will have a meeting, and the person who wants to change it will say, I'm interested in moving the couches out of this room and and putting some tables in and having a room for sewing. That's going to be discussed.

But let's say somebody wants to do something and the clerk says no. Well, where does the clerk get the power from? The clerk gets the power from School Meeting. So it's perfectly possible for a person to go to School Meeting, in the internal order section, raise their hand, be recognized, and say, the Building Maintenance Clerk did not allow me to do X, Y, and Z, and I'd like to talk about that. And ultimately the School Meeting could say, Yeah, the Building Maintenance Clerk was wrong.

And in fact this this did happen one time. A very long time ago, a student and several of his friends dug a very deep hole in the sandbox. And it wasn't just any hole. The purpose for the student who was in charge of it was to find gold. Unbeknownst to most people, the school sits on an ancestral river bed which has gold in it. So he knew that if he could dig down far enough he'd find gold. And long story short, he did. The hole was 13 feet deep. They needed pumps to get the groundwater out. It was a very big deal. It took over two thirds of the sandbox. It was very big. Very messy. Very industrial-looking.

At the time I was the Grounds Clerk. And when when other people in the community started complaining, I said, Look. I'm the Grounds Clerk. I get to make that decision. And over time people started reading the law book a little more carefully, about what does the Grounds Clerk do? What do other people do? And who is actually in charge of the sandbox? Well, after a number of very intense meetings, it was discovered that I was not in charge of the sandbox. And so the person was given a date certain to have it cleaned up. And it was.

Christen: It's often a concern, Oh gosh, kids are making decisions. How are they going to know what good decisions are? Are we going to spend the whole budget on candy? Well, we have a mixed age group. Our youngest student is 5. Our oldest student is 17 about to turn 18. I'm 44. And that is I think one of the the really beautiful baked-in structures that helps keep the balance. So when you have a student who, for example, says, I want to make a purchase request for a bunch of clay for the the art room. Then you get older students that say, Okay, how how is that clay going to be divvied out? Can one person use all of it if they wanted to? And then, Oh, we didn't think about that. Oh okay. So we've got to make some rules about how much clay you can use. So you get this checks and balances system because you've got these mixed ages, and because it's dialogue.

Larry: In the course of the school's nearly 30-year history, my guess is that I've lost as many motions as I've won. And a lot of times in the process of deliberation, my fellow community members will say, basically, Well Larry, have you thought about this? And I'll think about it and I'll think, no, I didn't think about that. I think you're right. This may not be the right way to do it.

Greg: My experience is that when you give real authority to students, when they understand that they actually can get it wrong, all of a sudden, with almost no exceptions, they want to get it right. It's important that students actually have real control, and once they have real control, they don't want to lose it. And so they're typically very thoughtful about what they do with that control.

We saw that the best when we were trying to untangle this ridiculous knot that was COVID policies. When we reopened the school, we almost didn't reopen, because we literally couldn't find two families that agreed on the same protocol for having students in the same building at the same time, or near the same building at the same time. And so we opened the school knowing that we had a policy that was good for maybe one or two days before the students would have control and could change that policy.

So we had to open with that understanding. And the students immediately came up with strategies to make sure that even if they passed a rule that would freak out a parent, they could back out of that, or they could authorize the Health and Safety Clerk undoing any rule that threatened losing a student. So they could try it and if anyone freaked out they could immediately back out. We hadn't even thought of having that kind of flexibility. We we just wanted to post what the rules were and keep it that way. But then they were able to riff and vary and adjust what social distancing was or what the eating rules were and make sure that no one freaked out. So it was really amazing to watch.

In that moment, I came to the understanding that my job as staff, and in this democracy, is to train my replacements. And to make sure that the more complicated and the more befuddling a particular problem is in our community, the faster I hand it off to the students and the School Meeting to figure out how they want to handle it, and not to pollute it any more than I have to with my initial reaction to it, but to support them in experimenting with how they can handle that situation.