Full transcript:

[00:00:00] Emily Race: Welcome to the Founding Mothers Podcast, where we're imagining new ways of living with one another and our planet. I'm your host, Emily Race. Today we are speaking with Jodi Grass. Jodi has worked at Oak Grove School and the Krishnamurti Marti Foundation of America in different capacities for the past 17 years.

Currently, Jodi is in her sixth year as Head of Oak Grove School. In her words, “I don't feel as though I work at Oak Grove. I spend my days here out of a deep devotion to the intent of the school as originally shared by Krishnamurtina in 1975.”

[00:00:48] Jodi Grass: What we're doing here is not just to benefit our students, but to benefit the world. And one thing that that our founder, Krishnamurti, said, was a school through its students should bring a blessing to the world, and that's how we see it.

[00:01:07] Emily Race: Before Oak Grove, Jodi worked for several non-profits, community organizations, as well as K-12 schools and a community college. She has also served on the boards of three non-profit organizations and two schools.

Over the past 33 years, Jodi has taught students of all ages through community education agencies that provided compensatory content to local public schools. Just before joining Oak Grove in 2005, Jodi was the executive director of a nonprofit organization that provided information technologies through NGOs in developing countries.

Welcome, Jodi. Thank you so much for being with us today. It's great to see you.

[00:01:45] Jodi Grass: You too. It's my pleasure.

[00:01:45] Emily Race: I'd love to start by you sharing a bit about yourself and the Oak Grove School, sharing with listeners who you are.

[00:01:53] Jodi Grass: I'm the head of school of Oak Grove School, which is located in Ojai, California. It’s a very small town if people aren't familiar with it. The school is preschool through 12th grade, so we have an early childhood program, elementary, middle and high school. Our campus is on 150 acres of an oak woodland. So it's a really beautiful campus, as you know. We are a progressive school, so we have influences of Montessori, Waldorf, Reggio, many different inspirations.

 We follow Common Core. Through eighth grade is our guide for our scope and sequence, but we give a lot of support and inspiration to our teachers to do it in a progressive way through project-based learning, emergent learning, and really interweaving throughout the whole program, an anti-bias curriculum.

[00:02:47] Emily Race: I wish listeners could visually see what Oak Grove School is like and I can fortunately speak to a bit of my experience in visiting the campus because Jodi so graciously invited me to take a tour prior to doing this episode, and it's one of those places that the minute you step on the campus, it has this very indescribable essence that there's something magical happening here.

I can imagine part of that is from the curriculum, from the students and the teachers and that whole relationship that's forming. But also the location, the nature center aspect of the campus. I don't know if there's anything you want to add from your experience of being on campus so listeners can feel that.

[00:03:23] Jodi Grass: Yeah, absolutely everything you just said. We hear that a lot. I felt that the first time I came to this campus, part of the intention of the school, the physical space is to keep the human elements, the buildings and the paths and the parking lots and so forth, in balance with the natural world.

It has a nice feeling of being in an oak woodland, but also with buildings and classrooms and playgrounds. And, you know, we often talk about, all schools are a living organism, right? There's something that is moving in dynamic and an outgrowth of the people that are here at any given time, the students and the adults. At Oak Grove, we really honor that. I think the natural environment in the campus is a great container for that.

[00:04:09] Emily Race: Nature's role, you can't really replace it . This may be a tangent, but when we first met, you shared a story of an alum of Oak Grove who you happened to meet at a holiday party through your husband. And he had shared, if I'm correctly remembering this, he had shared that there was a tree he specifically remembered on the campus. Do you want to share that story? 

[00:04:34] Jodi Grass: Yeah. It's such a sweet story and speaks so much to who we are as a school.

Oak Grove started in 1975, so we have alums. But we're such small school; there's handful of people out in the world that have attended Oak Grove. So my husband is a firefighter paramedic for LA County and he works in South Central and we went to one of the firefighters holiday parties.

Lots of people there and somebody sat next to me and said, oh, I heard you live in Ojai. And I said, oh yeah, I live in Ojai. And he said, I went to a school in Ojai when I was growing up and I said, Oh really? Which one? And he's like, you probably wouldn't know it. I was like, well, yeah, which one? And he said, Oak Grove.

And I said, I know Oak Grove. I work at Oak Grove. And his face completely changed. In all seriousness, he said, Do you know when you're looking at the Pavilion, which is one of our buildings, Do you know when you're looking at the pavilion, there's a tree on the left side? Is that still there? That was his first question.

And it was just so stunning, that the thing that he wanted to know about, not how's the school doing?, Oh, I graduated in this year. Are you in contact with any of the alums? His first thing was whether or not that specific tree was still on campus. Which is just such a beautiful moment to share with somebody.

[00:05:57] Emily Race: Thank you for recapping that story so that others can hear it from you. Because when you share that with me, I had this experience of having some chills because to build relationship with nature as a young child and have that carry with you in such a way that as an adult, you're still remembering a tree on your campus, I would assume that instills certain values in someone's life. And with that, another thing you shared with me that I think would be a nice framing to explain both how Oak Grove started and also the vision that you all have for the world. You talked about education as being a vehicle for social change. Can we talk a bit about that framework of thinking and how that's informed the origin of Oak Grove and the vision that you all are creating?

[00:06:41] Jodi Grass: Yeah. it's really the founding ethos of the school that what we're doing here is not just to benefit our students, but to benefit the world.

And one thing that our founder, Krishnamurti, said was, “A school through its students should bring a blessing to the world.” And that's how we see it.

It's not specific because our philosophical approach is not to tell children what to think, is not to lead them to think in a certain way, but to trust their natural intelligence and to reflect on their own thinking to understand who they are. And, as you stated, being in relationship with nature; it really is a profound teacher.  And so what we're doing is trusting that when humans are in an environment that they are trusted, that they will do the right thing. They will naturally want to care for the world they live in. That they will not hold onto their beliefs above all else, that they will question their own thinking, that they will create room for others and other ideas, that there's a humility that comes when you can be vulnerable as a human and not be given a guide map of this is what it looks like to be a human but that you're trusted to figure that out.

Everything we do is with that frame. We really center on our students, and how we make decisions as a school and how we support the environment for our students.

One of my colleagues said yesterday, Imagine the world if everyone centered on children, if all decisions were around well, how is this going to impact the children? You know, how are the children going to respond to this, are the children going to thrive if we do X? And I just thought, yeah, , imagine that world. And so in a way, in our own little way, that's what we're doing, we're imagining that these children that grow up here will be in the world as whole human beings.

And being a whole human being, you understand your impact. and you understand that you are connected to all things.

[00:09:08] Emily Race: Wow. First, to focus on what you just said around centering children in decision making. It's similar to a separate episode. We did that centering the earth in your decisions, and I feel like both of these. A factor of extending beyond one generation and looking towards the future. And one thing that you mentioned with the curriculum itself at the beginning, you used the word emergent. So I wanted to ask, whether it's through an emergent lens or something else, how does this philosophy of trusting children and centering them actually come to life in the day to day at Oak Grove?

[00:09:37] Jodi Grass: Great question. In every possible way, again, we trust our students, we trust our teachers. The broader container is, how do we support students to have a deeper self understanding? How do we support opportunities for self-reflection? How do we offer opportunities to question the “facts”, right? And teachers do that in many different ways. Every Wednesday we meet as a whole staff. We also have two and a half weeks throughout the year that we gather on campus without students, and instead of saying what you need to do in your class is tell everyone to pull out their journal and write what they're thinking, instead of doing that, our educators share with each other what they do. How do you offer opportunities for a student to self-reflect? How do you use emergent topics to integrate that into your curricula?

How do you do that? So if students are really interested in fire trucks, maybe kindergartners or first graders, or fires, fire season. Lots of questions: How do you use that interest and that momentum around that topic into language arts, into math and science. It requires a lot of creativity on teachers' parts.

But we don't tell them how to do it. We just ask them to play with that and to find ways to integrate. And they inspire each other. The first 15 minutes of the day, we do what we call pastoral care time.

And so every class for the first 15 minutes is doing a reflective practice or a grounding practice or arriving at school. And today I went with the seventh graders and what they did today for PCT was they got a name when they came in of somebody else in the classroom and they sat down in the reflective classroom for a minute or two to think, and then they were to apologize to the person whose name that they drew.

Of course the first question was, “well, what if I didn't do anything wrong?”  And then the teacher said, “well, you may not have intended to do something that was an imposition to that particular person, but certainly there are things that you have done that would've been an inconvenience to everyone here, right? Because we're in deep relationship and we're in a class. I mean, do you sometimes interrupt? Are there times when you come in late and everyone's already concentrating, and involved in something, right? Dig deep, and think about some way that you can apologize and to a student.”

They were able to come up with something to apologize for. And to me it's so profound in so many ways. Especially middle school. It's such an interesting part of human development.

But that's an example of what we ask our teachers to do. First 15 minutes of the day do this self-reflective practice and this is the kind of thing that teachers come up with.

[00:12:40] Emily Race: Yeah. There is this tension too. It's not about you are a bad student, you need to apologize. It's about cultivating what I'm hearing, a community and a self-awareness of your impact on others and a curiosity to look. How does every little thing I do or not do have a ripple effect on others? So bringing that consciousness and awareness at such a young age and the discussion around it, right? When the student asked, well, what if I have nothing to apologize for? There's a space to ask that question, which is so needed space to ask questions, period.

Another thing that struck me that I wanted to underline, it sounds like outside of Oak Grove, I see a lot of models of a top down, hierarchical model and what I'm hearing more, it's almost like from the ground up.

So the students are kind of informing that emergent piece of the education. The teachers are then cultivating creative ways of meeting those moments and then working together to cross pollinate ideas and share. It's almost from the ground up, is that how you would picture it, or, is there something else? 

[00:13:38] Jodi Grass: I think it's from all directions actually. It is ground up. That's such a beautiful vision. And then we also have the functional aspect. We do have a scope and sequence, right? We do want our students to have all the fundamentals and the foundation to do calculus their senior year, or to be able to write, a thought provoking essay in religion and ethics. And to do that, they need to know a lot about writing and communication and sit in structure and all of it. And language is even another thing. To learn a foreign language.

So there are practicalities that our teachers are needing to support and make happen. And so I think they have all of the regular shared pressures of any teacher in terms of, How am I going to get this information to the students?, and inspiration and additional pressure, maybe to respond to topics and interests and to do project based learning. We also have an outdoor education program and integrate pastoral care time so it kind of comes in at all directions.

My role, from my direction, is to hold a space where we are continuing to look and figure out ways to ask deep questions to support students, to listen and hear and get connected to their own natural intelligence, care for the physical environment.

A teacher's from that direction, I want my students to have this knowledge by the time they're done with this class.

And I think from the student's point of view is, what is coming up for you? How can you bring that to the classroom? And how do we engage with it when it comes? It's from every direction really.

[00:15:25] Emily Race: Yes. Thank you for clarifying that. And I also feel like that is important, to have a balance. Sometimes I notice in other movements there's an over-correction that happens to over-correct something that wasn't working.

And so what I'm hearing, there is this really nice blend when you say coming from all directions. So we still want to value, actually there is something to be valued when, some of that direction is coming from a top down, or from side to side or bottom up.

And you actually reminded me of a great point. So Oak Grove, you are still following the state requirements. How does that actually affect students' experience of school and if they want to leave Oak Grove at some point or go on to college, higher education, how does that all work together?

[00:16:05] Jodi Grass: Yeah, that's critical. So if we have a student that comes in in the third grade, we want to know that that student is going to have covered the same information or learning in their first and second grade that we're covering in our kindergarten, first, second grade. So we do follow Common Core and that scope and sequence so that we know that we're hitting all of those areas.

And then our high school is a college preparatory scope and sequence that is approved by the University of California system. All of our students take those courses to be prepared to go to college if they choose to do that.

One of the things that I feel most excited about is we're so small. We couldn't track students if we wanted to because we couldn't have enough classes and different options, so we really have one track in our high school. It's all college preparatory. We have students with learning differences. Students who really struggle in, maybe math or language or whatever it is, and a hundred percent of our students do the same coursework. It really is a beautiful highlight of the strength of our teachers . To be able to work with students that might have different abilities and aptitudes towards the stuff that they're working on.

Also to our students, and it just begs the question about tracking students in general.

[00:17:29] Emily Race: Can you actually define what you mean by tracking students? So we are all on the same page.

[00:17:33] Jodi Grass: It's different in different systems and in different countries but what it is, is you're either on a college track, or vocational track, or just a graduation track or get through it track. It's done in various ways for different systems, but there's a time where a student is identified asFor college or not college.

In some systems, if a child is determined not to be on the college track, even as early as in this country as seventh or eighth grade, it's almost impossible to get on that track because the number of classes that are available to them that they need to have that are prerequisites to get the courses they need to be able to apply to a four year institution. Thankfully, we have the community college system in this country, which is amazing and that allows everyone to go to community college and then from there can go to a four year university.

But it's just a question around, Is that needed? Probably practically, yes, at the way resources are available at this point for school systems, but it’s maybe more of a philosophical, long term, big picture question.

[00:18:38] Emily Race: Yeah. I love those big picture, philosophical questions.

And also so I fully understand, when you say it might be tied to resources, this track system, it's because there's a lack of teachers to go around or what's the resource aspect?

[00:18:53] Jodi Grass: A student would need to take certain courses. And you might get to be in ninth grade in a public school system and still not have mastered pre-algebra. And so you might have to be in ninth grade and be in pre-algebra. If you're starting ninth grade in pre-algebra, you're not going to get to calculus or even pre-calculus by the time you're a senior, unless you're taking courses outside,

So what happens, I think, I mean, I'm not an expert on this at all, but what I think happens is there's only so many teachers teaching calculus or physics or biology, chemistry. And so if you're not getting those courses, it's because there's only so many spots for students to get those courses; the way that it's determined is the students that already have done those prerequisites, they need to continue to take those courses so that by the time they're senior, they have the courses they need to apply for college. So I think it's a system that is necessary with the current way that we do things. You can't just dismantle the system on a whim, right? But I'm just wondering if that's needed, because I see here on a small scale we can scaffold and support all kinds of different learners to be on the same track.

[00:20:10] Emily Race: I do want to talk about this scale, in one moment, but I also want to clarify what, if anything, was the intention behind having the one track be a college track at Oak Grove? How does that connect the mission and vision?

[00:20:21] Jodi Grass: We want all students to be able to apply to a foreign institution if that's what they choose to do. Most of our students do choose to do that. Some choose to have a gap year, but sometimes, at 14 or 15 or whatever, you might not know what you want to do for the rest of your life. Most don't. We often will get students that say, well, I'm not going to go to college, so I shouldn't have to take these courses. What we want for them is at any point later in life, if they choose to go to college, they are prepared to go to college. So that's what we want for them to be able to make that choice.

[00:21:02] Emily Race: I'm hearing almost access and opportunity because if otherwise, they would not necessarily have that access or opportunity unless they go to community college first. And I love that there's also space, it sounds like just through the experience of going through the curriculum at Oak Grove and that environment that some students come from, this sovereign place and say, I actually want to do a gap year, or whatever that next step is for them. So there's freedom for all next steps to be there. 

[00:21:28] Jodi Grass: We also have students that choose to go straight to community college, for lots of reasons. Because they want to do the theater program there, they want to be close to home, or we've had students that are pursuing a sport professionally. And so they want to be able to give time to that. They want to go to the local community college, which is also a wonderful choice.

[00:21:47] Emily Race: I feel like this is now telling me I need to do a separate episode on higher education, because I have so many questions about how we could reimagine that.

But anyway, back to Oak Grove. So we started to touch on it a bit about the scale and I did want to ask you to share a bit about the classroom size and the student to teacher ratio and what that relationship looks like.

[00:22:06] Jodi Grass: It's different sizes for different grades. In preschool we have 12 per class and two teachers, and we move up to 16 and then 18. The ratio is a bit difficult because we have, and I think you know this from visiting, we have so many specialists. So for instance, in first and second grade, they have one teacher for each grade, and they also have a science specialist and a reading specialist, and a movement teacher and an art teacher. So there's a lot of other adults that they're interacting with and supported by so it's hard to give that ratio number.

We have 240 students and 73 staff. And all of our staff, myself included, our maintenance staff, front office staff, every single person on this campus that's employed by this school, has responsibilities to work directly with students. So we consider every adult that's employed by Oak Grove, a teacher.

Everyone here is a teacher. We all participate in professional development. So if you did it the ratio that way, it would give you a sense of how many adults each student is interacting with.

[00:23:23] Emily Race: Like this idea that you really are learning from multiple perspectives, really. Anyone is a teacher, and with that, that reminds me that you also have this philosophy around the family and parents being a part of this experience as well. So how does that look? How are parents and the rest of the family members included in Oak Grove?

[00:23:40] Jodi Grass: We see parents as our partners. Our founder Krishnamurti, when he started this school, which is really different than the schools that he started in India and in England, was specifically a day school.

The reason around that was that he said, “You can't have transformation of a child if you don't also have transformation of the parent.”

Even two parents raising a child, if they have different ideas, it creates tension or a sense for the child of confusion. We want to be working with our parents so that we're in partnerships, so we're having the same conversations.

Our parent education program really is much more focused on an inquiry than it is, Hey parents, this is what you have to do with your kids. So it's more around, how do we talk about sexual health and wellness and here are some information that we have around this, and concerns that we want to talk about and what are your thoughts and concerns, you know? We really want to be in those conversations with our parents. We want our parents to be actively involved in the school in many, many different ways. We can't have one reality for our kids here at school, and then they go home and have a completely different reality. We want that alignment, that seamlessness, going from home to school and that engagement is critical.

[00:25:01] Emily Race: You mentioned that there are times where the parents are coming on campus. There are also travel aspects. Part of the experience at Oak Grove is that students would go on these different trips that evolve year by year. Can you speak to what those trips look like and how parents also are included?

[00:25:16] Jodi Grass: In kindergarten, they camp on campus with their parents. In first grade, on campus with parents, learning about camping, setting up a tent, doing a fire, all of that fire safety. Then second grade will be away with parents. Third grade is away without parents. That's all beach, for second and third grade. Then the local wilderness for fourth, fifth grade, sixth grade in the local wilderness without parents, seventh and eighth grade, we put them on a plane. They go to the Teton Science School. We're just trying a new program that's in Washington, that's a wilderness program that they'll do this year, which is really exciting.

Ninth and 10th grade, they do week long backpacking trips. 11th grade they do the southwest on a 10 day trip, and then their senior year they go to India. Starting in third grade, parents are not on the trips. And one of the things that we think about is these trips are for our students to learn some agency, to begin self-reliance, learn about nature, and how to care for themselves outside of the home. And it's an opportunity for parents to begin to let go. It's, often harder for the parents than for the kids, and so for parents to trust other adults to care for their children, for parents to not be able to communicate with them via phone. We do send messages to parents that everyone's okay, but it's an opportunity for parents to begin to trust and let go. So by the time they are graduating from high school, and they are going to college or gap year traveling or whatever they're doing, that the parents also have grown accustomed to their child living and thriving and experiencing the world without them.

[00:27:07] Emily Race: I feel like you're already hitting on it, but just in case, what really is the core philosophy then behind that. It's about that autonomy and that self-reliance and giving those opportunities for students to see themselves as independent, in a sense?

[00:27:20] Jodi Grass: Absolutely. And exposing them to the world and different cultures and also care and stewardship of our natural environment, and an appreciation for nature. And all of those things. All of the above. 

And in every moment of every day in all of our lives we are having opportunities to navigate our social growth. That's another huge piece when you are away and you don't have a mom or a dad or your main caregiver with you, but instead you have teachers and your peers and you have difficulty or a conflict, or you're sad. That's a whole other level of skills that we're working on and developing and supporting.

And we do that here on campus and we do that through our trips. We often talk about everything that happens out in the world. All the ugly scary things that we see, that jealousy and anger and hatred and confusion and all of that is here because we're humans, right? So we have all that.

Instead of looking the other way or trying to solve problems by ignoring problems, we take every opportunity we can to say, let's work on this. Let's look at this. What can we do? What can we put into place? How can we solve this problem. That's something that elevates or is elevated when kids are off campus and they're in another place. It gives them more opportunities to navigate frustrations and be advocates for themselves, to talk to adults and tell them what you're needing.

[00:28:59] Emily Race: It feels so crucial because like you said, we're all relational beings and so how we relate to one another is something that often gets learned even unconsciously in a school setting at these younger years. So I'm curious then, how might you, as a teacher body, as a school body, how do you all hold that space?

For actually sitting with processing, supporting that stuff when it does come up. Because it's one thing to acknowledge the importance of it, but how do you actually navigate it together?

[00:29:27] Jodi Grass: Everyone does it differently. And so we have peace tables and some of our teachers really love using the tools of compassionate communication and restorative justice.

So, we use many different tools and modalities to hold and pause around conflict. It just depends on which adult. For myself, I tend to use more of a restorative justice model, having one person explain and articulate what's happening, what their experience was, what they're asking for, and the other student, to get really clear on what is it that you're asking for, what's not working. And then how can we move forward?

[00:30:05] Emily Race: Beautiful. And again, I can connect that dot back to ensuring that the parents are also modeling that at home. I mean, we're not perfect. We all do our best. I think even when we know of these tools, we're like, oh, I need to apply this now. But I could see how that consistency would be also important there.

And so this is actually a great segue because one thing I wanted to also highlight was the way that you all approach mental health, and what I experienced when you gave us this campus tour was there is almost a self-directed aspect to getting the support you need with mental health, but I feel like that's because of the environment and the resources that are available that give students permission within themselves to know it's okay to do so. Tthat was my interpretation, but I would love to hear from you. How do you all approach mental health at Oak Grove?

[00:30:49] Jodi Grass: Again, for many different directions ultimately, the objective is to give our students tools to recognize on every level– somatically, psychologically, socially, in relationship to others– to give them tools for navigating being human because we all have difficult feelings and we experience discomfort on many levels– physically, mentally and energetically, all of those ways. So it's partly how our teachers interact with our students, how we talk with them, how we role model taking care of self. Like, I actually need a moment right now or. I need to step back.

And then we have more of the explicit curriculum, which is largely around our pastoral care program. Sometimes people think that is pastoral as in religious, but the root actually is much more ancient than that. And it's really around guidance. Specifically not religious, but it allows for the other, the spiritual, the immeasurable.

And so that first 15 minutes of every day is explicitly not academic. This is time to do some somatic stuff, mindfulness, journaling, acknowledging maybe feelings or difficulties that you're having. And then as they're getting older, we have more and more opportunities to learn around that and the way we frame mental health.

We talk a lot about wellness and we also talk a lot about discomfort, that it's part of being human to have moments of discomfort.

It's not that we're trying to not be uncomfortable, it's that when we recognize we're uncomfortable, we ask, “What are we needing? What am I needing right now? Am I needing to lay down? Am I needing a cup of tea? Am I needing to go home? Am I needing to tell somebody that they've hurt my feelings or a teacher is not listening to what I'm trying to say happened to my essay?”

And, that part of self and acknowledging that there is a physical body and that we do have needs as humans and tending to that, we're not trying to cut that off or segregate it somewhere else.

As you saw, our pastoral care office is right at the entrance of our high school. At first, some people were like, oh no, kids might feel uncomfortable going in there because it's so visible and our response was, That's why it's there, because we want to say it's this important, this is important, and we all need support and help sometimes.

I think I told you that at some point last year, we realized a hundred percent of our student body had at some point self directed to the pastoral care office and our school counselor to say, I need support. I need help. It has been demystified and we're also communicating loudly that this is just a part of the tools that we need as humans. And then our infirmaries, we have one on one side of campus for small humans. And then on the other side where the high school is, we have a self-directed infirmary. So there isn't an adult there helping you, but it's self-serve.

Obviously we can't give medication, but we have essential oils, we have medicinal teas. They can lay down, they can sit in the rocker. We have a loner library on every topic you can imagine. And there's adults that come by and might say, Hey, you needing something?

They know if they need something specific, and we support them with that. Again, trusting that they know what they need and that they're old enough to take care of themselves.

[00:34:22] Emily Race: Again, the idea that that could have the ripple effect into adulthood and what types of adults would be born from that childhood and teenage experiences is so exciting, given that I know for myself and a lot of my community, we as adults, we have this disconnect from our own needs. Or there is this idea that I am broken or something's wrong with me if I do need help, or there's a shame around it. I love the demystification that's happening, at this age.

I also am recalling there was a student that we saw sitting outside of the classroom, and I just wanted to share that as an example of when I saw this student sitting outside of the classroom. My brain was like, oh, they must be in trouble , because when I went to school, that's what that would be.

But you shared that it was actually an example of a student speaking up what they needed and the classroom environment was like a little too much for them, sensorially. So they needed to sit outside to still be able to absorb the content.

[00:35:16] Jodi Grass: Absolutely. Yeah. And you know, like I said, we're a living organism, so we're always, always, evolving. Recently we had a conversation that our students might have too much agency. Sure, some students are leaving the classroom all the time. And so we're always correcting and reviewing and thinking through like, okay, so yes, take care of yourself and also it's okay to delay taking care of yourself. Know that you can do that during passing period. Know that you don't have to immediately say, My stomach doesn't feel perfect. I need some medicinal tea. You can say, my stomach's not feeling great today. I'm going to finish this English class. And then I'm going to go get a cup of tea in the passing period, you know? So it's like our next step, we're like, oh, delayed self care, you can wait a minute. You don't have to do it immediately.

[00:36:01] Emily Race: Which is so much about understanding your own resiliency or your capacity to be with an experience that's uncomfortable. So thank you for sharing that evolution, that emergent aspect. I spent a lot of time asking you about how Oak Grove actually does things, the way things are, because I feel like you are this living embodiment of a vision. And we talked about the vision at the start but before we start to wrap things up here, is there anything else around the vision that you all have at Oak Grove for the world that you want to touch on today?

[00:36:29] Jodi Grass: There's so much. For me personally, my own story, starting out as a political activist, I had my own epiphany, realizing that true, sustained change in the world is not going to happen with people demanding things change. It's going to be listening and there's a lot more listening that needs to happen. We pick a school theme every year. This year our theme is to listen with great care, attention and affection.

We talk about, how do you listen to someone else without thinking about the next thing you want to say or how do you listen without judgment or filtering through, “Well I know this person, they're always like this and this is what they're going to say. “ How do you just listen?

I worry about the world we live in. I worry about the violence, I worry about the anger and the insistence on being right. If we are doing what we set out to do, we're infusing the world with humble, clear minded, capable humans that are going to ask more questions, make less demands, and want to solve problems without creating new problems.

[00:37:43] Emily Race: Thank you for sharing that and one thing that strikes me is I want there to be more Oak Groves in the world. I don't know if you have thoughts around this, but for our listeners, they might be people who have kids in different aspects of a school system.

Maybe they're homeschooling, maybe they don't have kids. But I think we could all be inspired by everything you shared today because it has this reverberating effect on society. For folks listening, what might be an action or an inquiry that they could leave with out of this conversation?

[00:38:19] Jodi Grass: Questioning their own thinking. Not believing everything you think is right. Is it possible that I'm wrong? And that can be applied to anything, because if I leave space for being wrong, I'm going to listen. I'm going to reconsider, I'm possibly going to be more compassionate. So I would say, is it possible that you're wrong?

[00:38:42] Emily Race: That's such a great question, I’m even sitting with that myself. Thank you so much for that invitation.

And in terms of what is possible for other school bodies, other ways of educating, do you have thoughts on is there an option for folks to kind of take from the template that is Oak Grove, or is Oak Grove the only place that you're going to be able to experience this, or what are your thoughts on accessibility in expanding this philosophy?

[00:39:08] Jodi Grass: I know there are a lot of amazing schools. They're all around us. If you're looking for a school that centers on children, and aims to serve the whole child, you will find one. There are many, many, many, many schools. So there's that. And, it doesn't have to be through a school. To trust children and be in deep relationship with children can be done by anyone at any time. 

Maybe more practically, so much of what we do at Oak Grove is from the foundation of the teachings of Krishnamurti. So if folks are interested to know more about that, that's free and readily available online bookstores, libraries, so that around for people to engage with and explore on their own. It's out there. We're not the only place doing this work, I know that. Find your place, find your community.

[00:40:07] Emily Race: Well thank you for being a model of what this could look like, and also for having that emergent quality where it can evolve over time. Because I'm sure if we had this conversation six months from now, it might look very different.

I know there's so much more that we could touch on, so you already mentioned, if folks want to actually stay specifically connected to Oak Grove, what are the ways they can do that?

[00:40:27] Jodi Grass: They can go to our website, and if they're interested in taking a tour or learning more about the school, that's the place to go. We have various things that we do with our students that we're always looking for mentors and apprenticeships. We do something called Lizard Talks where we bring interesting people in that talk to our students for 20 minutes and the students ask questions. So if there are people who think, Hey, what I'm doing is really interesting and I think this could be a benefit for Oak Grove students to know about, they can go to our website and send us an email and say, This is what I do and I'm going to be near Ojai and I would love to share this with you in some way. And we would love that.

[00:41:09] Emily Race: I love that. Are there any other ways that our listeners can support Oak Grove?

[00:41:14] Jodi Grass: If they want to give us money, that's always a thing. We don't want to have more Oak Groves, we want more schools to maybe share in some of the things that we do. And one way to do that would be to have a program or a way to bring educators here to the school. And that's something we'd like to build. If there are people that want to support that, that's something we're hoping to do in the next few years.

[00:41:39] Emily Race: Oh, I love that. Thank you again for the seed that you all have planted at Oak Grove for what could be possible for a world where children are social change agents and have the capacity to listen to themselves and others. It's so needed. So thank you so much, Jodi.

[00:41:57] Jodi Grass: Yeah, thank you.

[00:42:00] Emily Race: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Founding Mothers Podcast. This podcast is produced and hosted by me, Emily Race, and edited by Eric Weisberg. If you want to support this show, please leave us a rating or share this episode with the important people in your life.

We'd also love to hear from you if you or someone you know would be a great guest to share about their vision for the world. You can email emily@foundingmothers.com or visit www.founding-mothers.com/podcast.