Thursday, April 28, 2016

Oak Meadow School

In the spring of 1980 I married a lady with two kids 6 and 8 years old who was also divorced like me then. I had custody of my son who was then 5 years old. By the end of that school year Sisson Elementary School in Mt. Shasta had too many children so they moved the 4th grade to the 6th grade to the junior High School then. So, within a month an 8th grader had broken a 4th grader's jaw. We had a 4th grader there too in school. Our decision in anger was to pull all our children out of school and to put them on Oak Meadow School Independent study and they remained on independent mail order study until the oldest was 12 years old. This was a very good decision and created one of the most amazing times of our lives for ourselves and our children.

At the same time unemployment was at 10% so in order to save money and to live our dream then, we took savings and bought land and sold one of our vehicles to buy material to build an A-Frame that we lived in for 5 years time. This allowed us to live 10 miles from the nearest gas station or town very remotely with no electricity with a wood stove for heat and a spring on the land for wash water and for bathing. It was a remarkable time sort of a Mt. Shasta "Swiss Family Robinson" kind of existence there with no TV or electricity. We really had a lot of fun as a family then. We cross country skied in the winters together and traveled as far as Banff and Jasper in Canada because of all the money we saved (likely around 60,000 dollars in rent by buying land and building our own A-Frame to live in).

So, the combination was good for the kids and for us and healed us as adults a lot from difficulties previous in our lives. The forest and the wilds and wilderness healed us and we taught our children using Oak Meadow School Independent studies as a form of Home Schooling that worked for us until the oldest asked to return to school at age 12. We went along with this and then bought a business near San Francisco while the kids finished High School and went to college then. But, leaving our wilderness eventually caused my wife and I to break up because neither of us was happy after we left the wilderness, even though this likely was the best for the kids in the long run for their lives and careers and getting married in their lives. So, it was a very good educational and healing experience for all of us at the time.

My son is a teacher now and my step son is a Fire Captain for CDF in California and my stepdaughter is now a lawyer in Portland, Oregon. So, all the kids are doing well and are now world travelers as well.

  1. Oak Meadow

    oakmeadow.com
    Oak Meadow’s progressive, experiential homeschooling curriculum for kindergarten to grade 8 and high school is flexible, affordable, nature-based. Use the

  2. Oak Meadow School near Brattleboro, VT

  3. Oak Meadow School Home

    www.oakmeadow.org
    Oak Meadow School is rooted in the child-centered Montessori philosophy, which fosters academic excellence, personal growth, and cultural awareness while nurturing ...
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