Kiana Labor

High School Senior, Bellows Free Academy
Fairfax, VT

What if it was all different? What if kids didn’t go to schools divided by age? What if 12th graders and kindergartners could work together? What if there weren’t grades? What if the school was a true resource center in the community?

Bellows Free Academy, a Vermont public school on the outer edge of the Burlington metro area, serves five small, most rural towns, Fairfax, Fletcher, Georgia, Fairfield, and Westford. All put together, the five towns have fewer people than our school district had students, and when creating change, we have seen both great advantages and some severe disadvantages that come with small places.

Bellows, originally a free school endowed by a railroad investor and local philanthropist, has 800 students, but those 800 students are in every K-12 grade. The building does have “areas” for high school, middle school, and elementary school, that are separated by a labyrinth of corridors and stairwells in a building with innumerable additions over its 80 years in existence, but the children aren’t really separated, they mix in all sorts of ways, from the on-campus farm, to the public library that’s part of the school, to the ways older kids are constantly mentoring younger kids.

My Education

Kiana Labor has been at Bellows for 13 years, an experience almost unheard of in America, but an experience rooted in the rural one-room schoolhouses that once defined American education. She has grown up within this community, and in turn, she has helped hundreds of others grow up.

What she most appreciates is that Bellows has allowed her to define her own learning, and own it. She sees those 13 years as her own education, not something imposed on her by the state or by adults. And she loves that she has been able to help other kids, as far ‘down’ as the Bellows kindergartners, and as far afield as school districts across Vermont, advocate for their own learning, and their own ways of assessing their learning.

Learner Empowerment, Developing Competencies

Kiana really hasn’t experienced traditional grading because assessment at Bellows is about competencies, defining them, achieving them, demonstrating them. So learning for Kiana has never been measured along any linear scale, rather, she can tell you all about what she can do now, as a human, that she perhaps could not do 13 years ago. That’s authentic and understandable.

With that comes the art of advocacy. Kiana and Bellows students learn how to advocate for their own ways to learn, for their own paths. We saw that everywhere, in the remarkable “farm-to-community” and learning through agriculture program, in a middle school corridor where game design was becoming a key entry point to all kinds of things, in the way even the longest children know how to seek out mentors.

A Life of Inquiry

Most powerfully, Kiana has learned that “it’s all inquiry,” that the path to learning anything is a process driven by curiosity and questioning, of exploration and investigation. It doesn’t matter if she’s trying to write, or working in math, or working on the world she wants to be part of. The beauty of Bellows is that this belief in inquiry, in curiosity, in reflection, in commitment to each other, to community, and to the world, seems genuinely ‘baked in’ from the very start.

It isn’t likely that most American communities have just 800 students, but the average American school has just 528 learners, the average for urban schools is 589, in the suburbs it’s 657. In other words, the Bellows arrangement of gathering children of all ages together, is about how we all choose to utilize our spaces. And the Bellows commitment to inquiry, student ownership, and authentic assessment? We can do that anywhere.