In 2008 Story Lab West recorded over 45 interviews during a reunion of students, teachers, and administrators who attended or taught at Sycamore School a child-centered elementary school in Claremont CA during the 1970s.  They were asked to reflect on the impact that attending Sycamore school during that period had on them over time.  

Teachers, students, and the principal at the time told stories about the community-wide campaign to recall a school board that voted to close Sycamore; about multi-grade classrooms and classes where students wrote and performed school plays; about being inspired to design the look and feel of their classrooms and playground; about being encouraged to pursue their curiosity. They were respected at Sycamore for being more capable than they were normally given credit for being and consequently were allowed an unusual level of independence and responsibility for their own learning. As one student put it, “the legacy of Sycamore is that you spend your childhood being treated like an adult only to enter a world that treats you like a child”

We learned that teachers at Sycamore were influenced by Summerhill, the “democratic” or “free” private boarding school in Suffolk, England. where new students are allowed to play freely until they decide to attend classes, starting with the ones that interest them most; where students have an equal vote with staff and teachers in their monthly meetings. In the early 1970s, a Sycamore teacher who was a CGU grad student at the time visited Summerhill and wrote his master's thesis on the importance of engaging students in creating “the environments of their classrooms and playgrounds.  Additional footage was recorded in my home studio.  

The entire collection of video interviews and events was organized with menus and directories and was produced as a 5 DVD set, “Sycamore in the Seventies”, and sold to attendees for $50. The entire collection of videos is in the process of being archived at Claremont Heritage, a local historical society that has agreed to host the online archive on Youtube in their repository. A Playlist of edited clips from this collection is available on my YouTube channel.

Sycamore School is the oldest elementary school in Claremont and is still regarded as unique in the community. If successfully archived, the reunion videos could become a valuable searchable and browse-able collection of testimonials by former students, teachers, and parents that the community and prospective Sycamore students could enjoy; and it could provide source material for educational researchers investigating progressive education.