ALC Mosaic Annual Report 2020
2020 has been a year of challenges and growth. Due to the pandemic, we have not had any summer or fall ALF trainings and retreats. While we have missed connecting with other ALCs in person, we have had the ability to take many months to dig deep in our community and make some important upgrades to our community structure and space.
Community Structure
Throughout the first half of the year, the increasing public awareness of police brutality to black and brown bodies has created more opportunity for our community to talk about race and how white supremacy shows up in our daily lives and structurally in organizations. We had families here participate in the protests for the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and the many other murdered black citizens as well an alarming experience here where armed police came on our campus due to a false report from drive-by citizen that there was black armed teenager on our campus. Additionally, we had some of our teen students profiled by the security cop at the Aldi’s across the street. Students, facilitators and parents came together to decide how to respond to each of these events, all of which raised our collective awareness on police profiling, brutality, and structural racism.
We had families leave due to the responses of our leadership (the staff and board), which we accepted as we strive to hold firm in our desire to listen to the black and brown voices in our community. At times this looks like us requesting that a white family listens and waits for us to respond to and meet the needs of a community member that has been historically marginalized and oppressed. As we continue to hold firm to doing this, we have lost some families who feel we are not being fair or just to them, but this has ultimately helped us continue to move forward as the organization we want to be.
The shining light for us over the summer of 2020 was led by Amber Irvin, who is starting her third year facilitating at Mosaic and her 2nd year as the Director of our Branches program. After a particularly challenging conversation about race took place over a community email thread, she spearheaded a new organization structure inspired by sociocracy to help our parents and staff understand which staff supports various domains in our ALC and found a better communication platform for parents to connect with each other and the staff. Tomis also revamped our admissions process and our new families entering Mosaic this year are coming in prepared for who we are and what we stand for.
Space Upgrades
Mid-March we closed our doors to students for the rest of the 2019-20 school year due to the pandemic. This ended up being an opportune time to close, however, because our third building was under construction and the many construction vehicles present would have made it challenging for our students to play outside. While the pandemic created some delays in the construction process, we were still able to finish the building over the summer. The staff that remained on campus throughout the shut-down was Tomis and Nancy, who live at Mosaic, and Lacy and Miguel who live nearby. We also have a parent volunteer, Sarah, move in whose housing was displaced due to the pandemic. Many outdoor space projects were worked on during the 5 months students were not on campus, including growing new grass for our fields, clearing out brush in our wooded area of campus for kids to play, building a retaining wall, fresh landscaping upgrades, new swings, and more. Re-opening in August 2020 was really fun and exciting as we saw the kids exploring and playing in our revamped play areas.
This space used to be overrun with brush, now it’s cleared out for play!
Re-Opening through the Pandemic
Through our new organization structure, we were able to develop a plan for re-opening the 2020-21 school year that felt safe for almost all of our families. We re-opened with a two pod system, a large pod for families who self-identified as low-risk for complications if they encountered the coronavirus, and a small pod for families who have risk persons in their families that they want to protect from the virus. The large pod attends school on campus Monday-Wednesday and has field trips Thursday and Friday. The small pod has some online offerings Monday-Wednesday with occasional optional small pod gatherings, and then they occupy our school space Thursday and Friday while the large pod is away on their field trips.
We have moved our community meetings to zoom and have had pretty good attendance in the parent forums, led by a parent representative that takes that feedback to our monthly community change up meetings (also on zoom). We added in a deschooling plan to our staff agreement that parents are welcome to join as well. This year our deschooling plan consists of:
Watching the movie 13th and discussing (we did this in September)
Reading and discussing “Raising Free People” by Akilah Richards (October-Nov)
Listening to the Seeing White Podcast by Scene on Radio (December-Jan)
Reading and discussing “Love and Rage” by Lama Rod Owens (Jan-March)
Reading and discussing “Decolonizing NVC” by meenadchi (Spring 2021)
So far the year has been off to a great start and we feel grateful to be in connection and community with each other. The time with students off campus has offered us the opportunity to reorganize and start the year off with a clearer and stronger sense of who we are and how we want to engage with each other.