I can still recall walking up the wooden stairway to a winding pathway peppered with chipped flintstones, up past the house that would later become the home of Carl Hebert, a friend and fellow alumni, along another path that served as the Clear Spring School track where we would run races each week. I have often returned to walk this path that connects Lovers Leap with the ruins of the Old Red Schoolhouse, where I first attended CCS in the early 1980s.
The building still stands in the sense that it remains, walls of memories stacked brick-by-brick. Though its legendary fire escape rests in an eternal repose and rusts under the undergrowth just out of sight of Howell Street’s precipitous descent, I remember the thrill of sliding down its spiraling length as a kid.
Behind the schoolhouse doors each morning, the main gathering room was abuzz with teachers and students making thousands of small preparations for the school day, which began when we would gather in a circle for a morning check-in that ended in a hand squeeze that moved, like a current, through the circuit of our lives.
Later, the school moved just up the hill, and new teachers came, and old ones left (though never left in full). Thinking of that building, so many memories crowd into my mind and blend into a buoyant sense of belonging. For me and many others, it was a place where ideas were engineered into experiences by each of our hands.
We would often hike down the road on the other side of White Street, down to a field where we would play kickball, never knowing that each game was something of a premonition of the next stage of Clear Spring School’s development, a new campus that now includes that field and new beautiful building all made possible by the school’s visionary benefactor John Weaver, whose steadfast support of the school has preserved its unique spirit from its first days to the day I am writing these lines.
While my schooling was finished in Eureka Springs public schools (at that time, there was no middle school or high school), I brought my CSS habits with me. I engineered a high school curriculum around my growing interest in Chinese Studies (by seeking out partnerships with the University of Arkansas faculty and graduate students). In that sense, I never left CSS, as I continued to believe that education was not a set of preformulated routines and rubrics, but an adventure and students are the explorers.
The second chapter of my experience with CSS began in 1998 when I returned for a year to teach middle school there after graduating from college. I did not know it then, but this second chapter would be the most impactful. Teaching at the school became my first venture into my calling as an educator. And while I have now had the opportunity to teach at notable institutions of higher education globally, that singular year (1998-99) still stands alone and above all others.
I came to know each of my students and their families so well, in large measure, because CSS is a family, a set of longstanding social bonds that undergird the town of Eureka Springs more generally but radiate far beyond, circling the globe and back again. The days I had the privilege to spend with each of them, the trips we went on (Memphis, Space Camp in Houston, and more), our class’s version of The Christmas Carol (re-adapted, imagined, and wholly staged by the class) and many other experiences great and small, remain unmatched in my teaching career.
Of course, life has not been downhill since then, but it was remade at that moment. I met my wonderful wife Amy that year, and our family can be traced back to that unforgettable moment. So, while CSS was a space of new beginnings for me, there were still more chapters to come. Not only did my mother become the Head of School, my brothers also graduated from CSS (Chris returned to teach there several times along with his wife, Ginny) and so did our eldest son, Isaac.
Isaac is a professional musician who now lives in NYC. He knew he would become a professional relatively young and wanted to accept an invitation to join a nationally touring band. Still, he could not fit it into the standardized templates of his high school, so we enrolled him for his senior year at CSS, where he took a wide range of senior capstone classes but also had the flexibility to pursue his burgeoning career. After graduating, he was admitted into the University of Oklahoma on a full-ride scholarship for guitar but opted to continue working full-time as a musician.
In later years, I brought the US-China Poetry Dialogue to CSS, where international poets met the students and teachers. In the months running up to the global pandemic, CSS had a moment of fame in China when an exchange of encouraging poems between Chinese and CSS elementary students made it into more than two dozen newspapers and publications in China. Another CSS student won an international writing competition that I host at the University of Oklahoma. So, looking back on my life, it is difficult to disentangle my path from that of CSS and the fantastic support of the school’s board members, teachers, parenting community, and students. Of course, I would never want to do so, and I look forward to the next chapters.
Clear Spring School is celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2024, and showcasing recollections of students, teachers and experiences to document the history, strength and purpose of independent education.