Starting with trust is a radical idea. Conventional schools operate on suspicion and trust needing to be “earned.” Some adults are willing to trust kids—to a point. Maybe kids can choose what art supplies to purchase, or vote on a field trip location, but surely evaluating a budget or hiring staff is too important for them to be in charge.

It’s true that most 8-year-olds have a pretty limited understanding of a school budget—but they do have the ability to ask good questions like “So are we paying you a lot or a little?” and “What’s director and officer’s insurance?”, questions that many adults avoid. When hiring staff, a student committee needs guidance on things like employment law and the norms of hiring, but at the end of the day, they are usually very good judges of which adults they would like to spend their days with.

In 13 years of actively “doing” Sudbury, I had my trust pushed to the limits. Usually, the students surpassed my expectations. This was brought home to me most starkly during the COVID-19 pandemic. As in many places, our school had to cease in-person operations on short notice and then dealt with a constantly evolving set of safety requirements. If there was ever a time for the adults to take charge, you’d think this would be it.

On the day before school closed, the few students present held a School Meeting, with a couple others on speakerphone, to decide how to run school virtually. The items on the agenda were unprecedented, but the format was the same. We voted in a student who had never run a meeting before as temporary chair, with others helping them out when the conversation veered away from our standard meeting procedures. Someone told us about Discord. Someone else told us a lot of people were using this thing called Zoom. I couldn’t imagine our school running virtually, and if lockdown lasted through May, I was certain we would close permanently. But on that very tough day, and throughout the next couple of years, School Meeting felt like a ritual that we could always fall back on.

My memories of the remainder of 2020 involve virtual school meetings competently run by our 13-year-old School Meeting Chair, and working with our Executive Committee—again, mostly young teenagers—to make hard decisions about how school would operate in the fall. As the staff grappled with complicated state regulations and concerns about students’ well-being, the students provided a regular gut check, and actually made our jobs easier by providing their input and offering creative solutions. We adjusted our concept of “virtual school” several times, opened in the fall fully outdoors despite not having any dedicated outdoor space, and limped through the Chicago winter with a combination of regular outdoor meetups and virtual offerings. I even think the regular democratic meetings helped some of our students’ mental health, giving them a way to contribute and have some sense of control amid the chaos.

At a time when it could feel like society was breaking down, we were able to come together with our community of young people and their parents to make tough decisions. These meetings were generally civil and level-headed. I won’t pretend they were easy—sometimes, consensus was impossible, and we lost families—but the school itself, and the heart of what made our community special, endured.

Besides trust, I think two other elements helped us weather this crisis. First was having practice in conflict. The students were able to remain respectful during tough conversations (and perhaps inspire the adults to do the same) because they had so much experience doing it.

It’s essential for any functioning community to accept that there will be conflict and create appropriate spaces for conflicts to be worked out. At a Sudbury school, School Meeting is one such place—a venue for heated conversations about Nerf gun rules or showdowns between the People Who Want to Use the Lounge for Video Games and the People Who Want to Use the Lounge for Music.

Another major way to handle conflict at Sudbury schools has traditionally been JC (Judicial Committee), an area where many Sudbury schools are currently making changes. At Tallgrass, we modified JC into RC (Restoration Committee), a model that focused more on problem-solving and eliminated punitive language, but still followed the same general structure. RC channels conflict and often either defuses or resolves it. For many kids, just the act of submitting a report (by writing or dictating it) seems to resolve a lot of the tension. Sometimes just telling someone else about the problem will lead the student to either decide it’s not a big deal or figure out a solution on their own. And often, of course, talking it out through the RC process results in either two people understanding each other’s point of view or an effective suggestion for behavior change. (I’ll note here that the vast majority of conflicts at Sudbury schools are handled informally, in the moment, by the students themselves—also a great form of practice.)

The final element that lends strength to School Meeting is playfulness. In my experience, School Meeting is often MORE effective than a meeting made up only of adults. I think this is partly because students are able to approach a meeting like an occasion for play. Parliamentary procedure and the school lawbook provide the rules of the game. There is room to propose zany ideas—“Let’s buy a school cotton candy machine!” “Can we all take a trip to my grandpa’s farm in Ohio?” The other “players” workshop these ideas until they are either discarded or transformed into something workable.

Even during the most serious meetings, students will often break the tension with a well-timed joke or by doing something unexpected. One year every School Meeting ended with a student quoting a meme. (Honestly, that one kind of irritated me, but everyone else loved it!) And when the playfulness goes too far, the “game rules” can be changed. A little good-natured campaigning during election week once devolved into threatening signs and quid-pro-quo deals for votes, resulting in new rules addressing corruption.

I don’t want to over-emphasize the importance of the formal structures of the school. They are a small part of most students’ days, and are only one piece of what makes a Sudbury school special. But I hope this helps you envision more clearly how Sudbury can look in practice. Sudbury education changed my life, and the lives of many of my students. It has the potential to change the lives of so many more people if adopted widely—maybe it can also change yours.