What About Another Answer in Schools? — An Alternative Center in Midtown Would Give Frustrated Parents Options

By Lindsay Melvin lindsaymelvin@commercialappealcom

Two weeks into the school year and it was already starting: Krista Early was getting calls about her 7-year-old son.

His restlessness and easily swayed concentration has more than once dragged her through a series of parent-teacher meetings. “Their solution was, ‘Let’s just medicate him,’” said the Midtowner.

Early doesn’t deny her son is a handful for any teacher trying to follow a syllabus, but she feels public school may not be the answer for her high-energy kid.

Along with more than a dozen other parents, Early is now considering enrolling her child at a new alternative school set to open in June.

The Natural Learning and Home School Resource Center will follow the Reggio Emilia method and will be one of the first of its kind in the country.

Named after a city in Italy where it started nearly 30 years ago, Reggio focuses on child-directed learning, where teachers seize opportunities for learning by following their students’ interests. Students’ progress is evaluated by daily projects rather than traditional testing.

Typically, Reggio schools are pre-K and kindergarten. But the new school set for Midtown plans to go all the way up to 12th grade.

Working for the past year to open the school, founder Dalila Early (no relation to Krista Early) said, “There are so many good little programs here in Midtown but they all stop at kindergarten.”

A full-time mom and Cooper-Young resident, Dalila Early, 34, didn’t like the options for her 3-year-old son’s future. The private schools were all based in faiths she didn’t follow and the public schools were not diverse enough and too focused on testing, she said.

“Testing to me is a way to label children superior or inferior. I think a school can do so much for our children and prepare them for life in a broader way,” she said.

With a business school background and no experience in education, she started to consider opening her own school.

Her creation is now planned for the building housing the New Ballet Ensemble & School at 2166 Central Avenue, also known as the Ice House.

Early envisions the impending center as a place where students face each other instead of chalkboards, lesson plans are flexible and learning often trickles outdoors to the school’s compost heaps and organic gardens.

Meeting with 15 to 60 parents around her neighborhood interested in starting a new school, Early discovered families were turning to homeschooling or settling for mediocre schools because of the cost of private education and the inability to find alternative schools that continue beyond kindergarten.

The other Reggio-inspired school in Memphis is the Barbara K. Lipman Early Childhood School and Research Institute, which also ends at early education.

Looking for the right school for their children, Early pored through 30 alternative education books before coming across one on the Reggio method. The book was called “Possible Schools: the Reggio Approach to Urban Education” and the author, Ann Lewin-Benham, coincidentally lived just blocks away.

Having started one of the first Reggio schools in the country and the founder of the children’s museum in Washington, Lewin-Benham has since become Early’s mentor.

Reggio Emilia earned worldwide attention in 1991 when Newsweek magazine hailed its preschools as the best in the world. Still, it hasn’t received nearly the recognition the Montessori schools have. According to Early, there are only about 900 Reggio schools across the United States.

The new school will begin with pre-K and each year add a grade. The undertaking will cost approximately $50,000, all of which is coming out of Early’s pocket. Currently, she’s working on a nonprofit status for the school, which will charge $5,000 tuition. In order to attract a diverse student body, there will be a sliding scale fee for families who cannot afford the payment.

– Lindsay Melvin: 529-2445

(c) 2006 Commercial Appeal, The. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.