rf school for River Canyon School students to go after graduating from kindergarten, and remedying that situation is part of the impetus for the initiative, Ebel said.
Because the Waldorf Method may be such a foreign concept, and raise more than a few questions about its academic merits, the Grand Junction Art Based Charter School Initiative will host a meeting 7 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 2, at Koinonia Church.
The public is welcome to attend the meeting and participate in the dialogue that will happen as the group continues to figure out the best way to incorporate the Waldorf Method into a charter school setting.
The Grand Junction Art Based Charter School Initiative also has a Facebook wall where questions can be posted and information exchanged.
Sarah Shrader, a River Canyon School Board member, loves the education her children received at River Canyon, but also appreciates the education her eldest are getting at Scenic Elementary School.
Shrader said the Waldorf-inspired charter school would be most valuable because it would give parents, particularly parents of middle schoolers, another choice when searching for the best way to educate their children.
Shrader, who has a master’s degree in education, was introduced to Waldorf as a 24-year-old teacher in Arizona.
“I fell in love with the Waldorf education,” she said. “I think it’s really intuitive. One of the things that made me fall in love, was they teach everything through the arts and the outdoors ... Waldorf is appropriate to the physical and emotional development of a child.”
She recognized that an outsider may see a Waldorf-inspired education as lacking the academic rigor considered imperative for an American child to compete in today’s technologically intelligent world. But that is not the case, she said.
The way children learn — she assured parents that their children will learn — in a Waldorf-inspired school is just different from the traditional school setting. Students use the arts, oral stories and nontraditional methods to discover how and why things work instead of memorizing facts and figures from a textbook.
“There is so much art and such a rich base of literacy,” she said. “We can’t really measure it.”
To learn about the Waldorf Method go to waldorfanswers.org or whywaldorfworks.org, which is run by the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America.