By
Natalie Edwards Special to the Daily Press
When Joel Pelcyger traveled to New York City as a fellow for a two week Heads of Schools program offered by Columbia University’s Teachers College, it was the first time in 37 years he had spent any extended length of time away from the school he co-founded. Since the age of 24, when he helped begin Santa Monica’s PS #1 Elementary School, Pelcyger has been a campus mainstay.
“When I started a school, I didn’t know that I was starting an institution,” Pelscyger said.
The “PS” in the school’s appellation stands for pluralism, a philosophy of educational diversity that has always defined the school. Pelcyger adopted it as a young 20-something unsuspectingly thrown into a short-term teaching job at a school in upstate New York. Following graduation from college, he had been trained as an urban planner by VISTA, the domestic peace core standing for Volunteers in Service to America, but was quickly hired by a school in quick need of a teacher.
The school was an independent educational establishment with a region-wide teacher workshop and, in the early 1970s, a bastion for new ideas about educating children. Pelcyger taught in the mornings but found himself during his free time soaking up the fever for reform education that pervaded the school’s atmosphere.
“During the afternoon and evenings, I got turned on to these exciting educators, about different ways of looking at things,” Pelcyger said.
Within two years, Pelcyger founded PS #1. It was an experiment, an exercise in not only testing new ideas but also devising a system by which to implement them. If Pelcyger was daunted by the task, he didn’t reveal it. Tall and briskly suited, with oak brown eyes and a tuft of graying hair, Pelcyger was driven by an optimism that doesn’t appear to have faded.
“I didn’t know of the existence of private schools until about two years before I started my own. I didn’t know that education was my calling. I was a young person that wanted to change the world. I was a child of the 60s,” Pelcyger said.
The idea of educational pluralism, hammered out through the years by Pelcyger, teachers, staff, and parents, manifests itself at PS #1 in the location and colorful modern design of the campus. With 20 percent of students receiving financial aid, Pelcyger made a point to situate the school in the city. Nestled in the wide, perpetually busy streets of Santa Monica, Pelcyger didn’t want PS #1 to take on the spirit of a “school on a hill.” PS #1 would be an urban school.
Nonetheless, with broad panels painted in bright hues, an open lawn anchored by a raised wooden stage, and the site of the oldest oak tree in the city, a large sprawling beauty with enough shade for a class of kids, the school has the atmosphere of an alcove.
“How do you match the philosophy of a school with an architectural program? It started 10 years ago, building our dream campus. We’ve attracted a number of architects who want their children to go to school here because it lives its philosophy through its architecture,” said Pelsyger.
The school divides multiple coupled classrooms that share a workspace. The rooms are playful spaces with uneven ceilings, open trusses, and artwork everywhere. Each classroom has a 26 kids to two teachers ratio. Teachers are called by their first names and each class comprises two grades. With the coupled classrooms, together termed a “cluster,” every child has immediate access to study-partners and play-mates that range in ages. The idea is to encourage collaboration between teachers and students and establish a sense of community that celebrates diversity.
“The cluster concept provides what I think of as concentric circles of comfort that the kids need to develop in order to feel safe. We don’t just group kids by their academic experience because you learn differently depending on the position you have within your peer group,” said Pelcyger.
That structure, united with a firm disenchantment with the model of continual testing mandated for public schools by the No Child Left Behind Act, has allowed PS #1 to pursue educational pluralism because it is meant to give students the freedom to learn at their own pace. Pelcyger confines his disdain for constant testing as a measure of performance to elementary schools, preferring instead to set standards based on but not restricted to state requirements and only sending checklists of progress to parents a couple times a year.
“Kids are different from each other and learn in different ways, at different rates, and at different times. You want to fit your program around a child rather than fit your child into a program. That’s been the whole essence of this school for 37 years now,” Pelcyger said.
A final focus of PS #1 is the inclusion of parents in the development of the school’s curriculum, utilizing them both for their input during monthly meetings and for their own capacity to instruct kids. Parent participation ranges from the design of campus buildings — for example, PS #1’s library — to the use of their teaching abilities in supplementing and integrating art projects. An assignment to design a building inspired by the biology of an insect — an idea gleaned from reading Nina Laden’s “Roberto the Insect Architect” — benefited from a visit to the Science Museum bug exhibit and the help of a professional architect, not coincidentally a parent of a PS #1 student.
“Parents have started so many traditions in our school that looking back I can’t remember who started them. You want parents to give of themselves and help kids know other adults in lots of good, open, and enriching ways. The more we can foster that sense of community and help parents find their niche in school, not just their children’s, then this community changes and grows,” Pelcyger said.
“I feel really fortunate that the whole philosophy that we hit upon in 1971 was one of educational pluralism. If you keep the school small enough where you know every family and you get everyone involved and working together, then it is pretty easy to make it your calling,” said Pelsyger, “because the work is never done.”
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