July 6, 2004

Waldorf school in escrow on new site

By Bill Choy
Ashland Daily Tidings

The local Waldorf School community is in the final stages of having a site to call its own.

The Waldorf community is currently in escrow on 1.7 acres with a home on Valley View Road just outside the Ashland city limits, said Jewel Baldwin, a Waldorf parent who was one of the organizers in finding a new school site.

Since the Waldorf School of the Rogue Valley location became the Willow Wind Learning Center about five years ago, independent classes have been taught at the Clay Street Community Church of God and at Willow Wind.

The new location followed an unsuccessful bid to rent space with the Ashland School District and at the Train Depot Building in Talent, owned by the city.

The Valley View site was a good way to increase available space and bring together classes now being held at different locations.

"It's a big step in becoming more centralized, but still having the classes function separately," Baldwin said. "This is an investment in Waldorf education."

Baldwin said the school hopes to move to the new location in January or fall of 2005.

The Valley View location was purchased by two Waldorf families, Baldwin said, noting that the school plans to purchase the property from the parents as it develops during the next few years.

"It was financially very doable and it's a location, being so near the freeway, (that) opens us up to attract those students from Talent and Medford," she said.

This fall, all the classes will be coming together to form a single institution - The Siskiyou School. Classes will be held at the Clay Street location and at the Church of the Nazarene on East Main Street for those students from first through seventh grade. About 110 students are expected to attend.

Waldorf parent Judy Newton is pleased to have a new location to call her own.

"I think it's very exciting," she said. "We've been looking for a site for four years and it's wonderful for this to finally come together. ... It's an important aspect of Waldorf education to have all the classes together in a common area."

The school still has to get a conditional use permit from Jackson County, Newton said.

"We hope that the county will approve of the plan so we can enable our entire community to be together," she said.

In March the Ashland School District stopped several months of negotiations with the Waldorf community, which had been seeking to rent classroom space from the district.

Superintendent Juli Di Chiro said at the time that negotiations were closed because of concerns brought up by the Ashland Education Association. They felt having a Waldorf school under the umbrella of the school district would be a contradiction of the basic philosophy of public schools.

"It was a setback," Baldwin said. "We had work hard for months on an agreement. ... It took us a few weeks to digest the impact, but we knew we had to go on and look for the best opportunity at hand and to put roots in a new location."

In May and June, the Waldorf school community was looking at renting space at the Train Depot Building in Talent. However, the lack of playground space and expansion possibilities, along with safety concerns about the proximity of the railroad tracks, made Waldorf officials look elsewhere.