The Community School

An exciting new year of summer fun at The Community School begins on July 8th
with our first week of Messing About (for kids 4 – 7 years old)
and Out  and About ( for kids 8 – 12 years old).
Art, crafts, and lots of fun exploring the great outdoors!

NOW IS THE TIME TO RESERVE YOUR SPOT!
Don’t miss out!

Check our Summer Programs listings for more information and registration forms.

The Community School Board of Trustees is most pleased to announce that Lianne Prentice has been named our Interim Director. Beginning July 1, 2012, Lianne will be taking over leadership of the school from Jenny Rowe, who will leaving to become the Head of the Friends School of Portland after six years serving as our Director.
Lianne is well known to TCS and its greater community, for she has been a central part of the success of TCS over the last 11 years. She has served as Senior English Teacher, Middle School English Teacher, Development Coordinator, and Dean of Studies, just to name of few of her positions. She has worked hard to fully integrate The Community School with the community, welcoming people into the school by dreaming up and pulling off such wonderful and unique events and programs as The Farmers’ Table lunches, Soup, Story and Song evenings, and Bluegrass on the Bearcamp concerts.

Lianne’s family–daughter Madeline, son Henry, and husband Chris Moneypenny– have been a beloved part of the TCS family for the past decade.

We are fortunate to have in Lianne a person with such diverse abilities and intimate knowledge and experience of TCS. It is testimony to the wonderful staff of TCS that we are able to promote an Interim Director from within to make a smooth transition possible.

Lianne’s commitment and dedication to The Community School has been essential to our growth and success. We feel she is the perfect person to continue TCS’s mission while the Board initiates a search in the coming year for a long-term Director for The Community School.

Art in all its many expressions is an important part of the life of a Community School student. Through choral or instrumental music, theater, drawing, painting or ceramics, all the students at TCS have the opportunity to grow through artistic expression and to hone their skills in Monday arts classes. Most often, appreciation of all this creativity remains inside the walls of the Perkins Farm schoolhouse on Bunker Hill Road. However, on the first day of this year’s pottery class, students responded to a challenge by Suzanne Weil to make their efforts count for others.

Under her guiding hand, students spent January and February fashioning coil and slab bowls with the intent to use their bowls to help feed the hungry. Inspired by the Empty Bowls Project, emptybowls.net, “the basic premise is simple: Potters and other craftspeople, educators and others work with the community to create handcrafted bowls. Guests are invited to a simple meal of soup and bread. In exchange for a cash donation, guests are asked to keep a bowl as a reminder of all the empty bowls in the world. The money raised is donated to an organization working to end hunger and food insecurity.”

Please join the Community School students and area potters for soup and bread and a bowl at the Thursday, March 15th Farmers’ Table lunch. Like all Farmer’s Table meals, the cost is what you feel you can pay, remember, on this day all proceeds will be donated to organizations fighting hunger – and everyone will leave with a unique bowl fashioned by the hands of someone with a vision to help.

On  January 4  two students from The Community School were privileged to serve at the State Capitol in Concord as Legislative Pages for the first session of the year.  The duties Trista Goddard of Sandwich and Clara Hodges of Tuftonboro assumed for the day had them running up and down the State House stairs, copying and delivering various documents and bills under consideration to members of the New Hampshire House of Representatives.

Walter Sword, House Sergeant-at-Arms, and his assistant, Beth Rousselle, kept the girls busy. Asked about her day as a Page, Hodges says, “I learned a lot about the way that bills are passed.  It gave me a good perspective on how our Representatives are real people and not just faceless voters.” Working in the midst of real legislative proceedings on the floor of the New Hampshire House proved to be unbelievably exciting.  “It was an excellent experience.  I’d love to go again,” enthuses Goddard.

Acting as messengers between the Representatives, the girls were surrounded by impassioned debate.  What great preparation for the “Salon Series” Goddard and Hodges are involved in Thursday afternoons at The Community School.

All winter, Community School students are reading essays by philosophers and thinkers of the 18^th and 19^th centuries, when “salons”, or social gatherings in homes, served as a venue for discussing emerging ideas of the day. Beginning at 1:00 PM each Thursday through the end of February, students, faculty and interested visitors can engage each other in debating the relevance of these thinkers to our world today. In the midst of these discussions, Goddard and Hodges are again surrounded by impassioned voices. Topics range from the role of government to human nature, the principles of morality, and the rights of humans.

The full school hiked up into the Ossipee Range to study the unique geology of these mountains.  At the Bald Knob cutoff students looked for extrusions and intrusions in the rock.  What better way to combine history, science, backwoods ethics, and teamwork?