Fall Newsletter 2022

Upcoming Events

Letter from our Administrative Director

Winter Fair

Dec. 4, 10am - 3pm

Grade School Campus 2938 Washington St.

Sign up to volunteer!

Check your email and bulletin for Sign ups or email Advancement Associate Karen Santiago at ksantiago@ sfwaldorf.org.

Stars, Winter Fair currency, are available for pre-purchase on the website: sfwaldorf.org/winter-fair

Dear Friends,

A central value of San Francisco Waldorf School is the focus on promoting and sustaining deep human relationships. We say that our education is person to person and that the magic of education happens in the relationship between teacher and student. The magic of community happens between families and between generations.

In this newsletter, we highlight a handful from the 10+ multi-generational families who are alumni and now also parents of currently enrolled students. Over the past 10 years, many parents who graduated from our school have enrolled their children here. They trust our school and want to provide for their children the same solid foundation, the same memorable and extraordinary education they received. These multi-generational families deepen the familial quality of our community, making it a place where families share resources, support each other through life changes such as births and passings, and take care of one another’s children afterschool and on weekends.

Particularly in the early grades, SF Waldorf School seeks to create a homelike environment in the class, bringing into our school activities, celebrations, and cultures from our diverse families. Children cook and clean together and play like siblings—with less squabbling :)

We are grateful to our alumni who choose to bring their children to SF Waldorf, expanding and deepening the feeling of family and community across the grades.

I wish for you plenty of family time—nuclear, extended, and within the SFWS family—over the winter holidays.

Winter Concert

Dec. 9, 6pm - 8pm

High School Campus 470 West Portal Ave.

Sincerely, Craig Appel

Craig at a Fundraising Bake Sale, ran Thursdays weekly by Grade 8

For a calm and welcoming environment

by

of purpose and art and music. My parents were free spirits that stayed up late and woke up late, with lots of people and friends around. School provided a calm, safe, and welcoming environment I could count on. A special moment was always the day during December when it was my turn to open the door on the Advent Calendar and carry the candle.

succeed in life, but I didn’t want them to turn into people who fixate on tests and grades while missing the joy of learning. Keeping kids kids, for those extra few years, and finding a school with a community of shared values and not a ton of screen time were all important. And, besides a strong education, I wanted them to be at a school that helped them to be good and kind people.

Back in the 80s, my godfather ran into someone on Haight Street involved with a new school, the San Francisco Waldorf School. He got my parents interested in it and we checked it out. I wore a very proper dress on the school visit but accessorized with tie-dyed tights. I was invited to join SF Waldorf‘s First Grade class (the school only had a first grade and kindergarten at the time), but it was politely suggested to my parents that tiedyed tights could be distracting in the classroom!

I remember that I loved coming to school every day. There was lots

Certainly academically, I was really prepared for high school. I left SF Waldorf in the 7th grade because my parents moved us to Montana. I was put in honors classes in math and language arts in public school. SFWS definitely developed my writing skills. I was a good writer and reader and was just inspired to learn for myself. I left with a curiosity about the world and the subjects I was studying. In college and law school and beyond. I was internally driven and curious about learning instead of just doing what I was told to for grades, and I do attribute that to SF Waldorf.

I chose SF Waldorf School for my own children, because I was looking for a place where they would develop a real love of learning. I, of course, want my kids to do well and

Of course SF Waldorf has changed in some ways since I attended. The school was in startup mode and a lot smaller. There are more subject teachers now and an emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion. SF Waldorf always had that to some extent with stories and festivals but now does so with more intention, meeting our world at this point in time. And some things are the same and they still meet the needs of children today. There’s the integration of the arts and just the beauty of the school and the curriculum. In some ways, the world can be an overwhelming and even ugly place. To be a productive and happy person it helps to start with a place of inner and outer security, to know there is good. And then from there you can confront all of the world’s problems. SF Waldorf

tzaddi thompson, lawyer, former sfwgs student, alumni parent & grade 6 parent, board member

Tzaddi Thompson née Smith children Dominic (SFWGS alumni) and Mieke (Gr.6) and brother Cheth Smith (former SFWS student in 1980s)

Tzaddi Smith, circa 1985, 5th or 6th grade

For a timeless childhood

lenya bloom, sfwhs chair & sfwgs alumni, class of 1994, gr 2 & 4 parent

Although comfortable in a princess crown, Lenya Bloom currently dons a different hat as the SF Waldorf High School Chair while her two young daughters attend the SF Waldorf Grade School.

Lenya helped found Escuela Raíces Waldorf School in Puebla, Mexico, to provide her children with an Early Childhood education similar to the one she had had and wanted for her daughters. Lenya returned to SF Waldorf School during the pandemic and enrolled her growing children at the Grade School—which she attended and her mother Joan Caldarera helped found—in hopes that they could have the opportunity to “just be present in each moment

of their childhood without feeling the need to analyze or project anything.

This is something timeless that SF Waldorf offers.”

SF Waldorf Kindergarten with Monique Grund, circa 1984, including students Lenya Bloom (front row princess with yellow cape), Elsa Murray-Lafrenz (front row white rabbit), and Cameron Washington (back row right king), now parents with children at the school.

Lenya with Camille (Gr.4) & Madeline (Gr.2)

Now that I am an adult I can look back and appreciate the ageappropriate environment structured around the children which allowed us to live each day as a new beginning.

Lenya reflects on the hope behind the impulse: “Now that I am an adult I can look back and appreciate the age-appropriate environment structured around the children which allowed us to live each day as a new beginning. My hopes are not only that my children will eventually look back with warmth and nostalgia but also have a profound relationship with everything they learn. My own early education has served me as foundational knowledge from the 9th grade onward, and I continue to draw and and work with the stories and images from my grade school experience. I believe SF Waldorf School can provide the same useful foundation for my daughters’ future thinking capacities.

My hopes are that my children will eventually not only look back with warmth and nostalgia but also have a profound relationship with everything they learn.

Monique, her Kindergarten teacher, seen in the photo on the left dressed as Mother Hubbard, still works at the school as an Assistant Nursery Teacher. Lenya shared how remains connected with Monqiue and other SF Waldorf family:

“I still see Monique regularly and love that my children have also met and spent time with her. I recently ran into my class teacher, Roberta Ricketts, and we have been in touch over email on and off for years. My dearest friend to date was in kindergarten with me, and I do occasionally run into or check in with a few other classmates. I was excited to share this vintage Halloween picture with my classmate Mayela who lives in my neighborhood and who I have seen a few times recently.” ~

For curiosity & community

cameron washington, musician & filmmaker, sfwgs alumni & board member, gr. 4 & 7 parent

I love the community at SF Waldorf. I loved the community of friends I had while going to SF Waldorf as a kid. I am still friends with people from my SF Waldorf kindergarten class. I love the cross-classroom community the children have at this school.

When asked why he chose the same school he attended for his two boys, Cameron Washington, then kindergarten king and now current SF Waldorf School Board Member, offered these thoughts:

“The main reason I wanted my kids to be as SF Waldorf is that the school fosters a love of learning. Instead of forced surface-level education like many places these days, a Waldorf education makes children thoughtful, empathic, creative, and curious about the world, which then creates an everevolving quest for knowledge later in life.

And the parent community at the SFWS is a one-of-a-kind group to behold. Everyone at the school cares about everyone else's family, and that is a magical thing to see.” ~

For creativity & intentionality

elsa murray-lafrenz, sfwhs art teacher & sfwgs alumni, class of 1995, gr. 2 parent

Second, there’s the community.

with husband and daughter, Ivy (Gr.2)

Elsa Murray-Lafrenz née MurrayClark, the white rabbit front and center, is now an SF Waldorf High School art teacher, working with all grades in painting and drawing.

She explains, “My parents chose this school for their children because of the emphasis on play, imagination, and creativity.

Elsa

Cameron playing trumpet for Monique, his Kindergarten teacher, in the Nursery Christmas Tree parade, 2021

Cameron & sons Elijah (Gr.4) & Parker (Gr.7)

Everyone at the school cares about everyone else’s family...

High School Girls

Photo Credit: Scott Chernis

We’re always thrilled to see SF Waldorf School alumni out in the world excited about what they‘re working on while effecting positive change for the greater good. Maya Silverman, who attended SFWS 5th through 12th grade, is an astrophysicist and a Ph.D. student in the UC Irvine Department of Physics & Astronomy who credits her initial interest in the subject to our current high school science teacher Dr. Paolo Carini. Dr. Carini, she claims, “helped her learn to ask a basic question about nature: Why? If you ask ‘Why?’ enough times,” Silverman explained, “you eventually reach questions that are the purview of physics, and, even more fundamentally, particle physics.”

Maya researches the nature of dark matter, which scientists believe makes up most of our universe. As if this isn’t on its own an astronomical task, she has also set her sights on social justice in her field, believing “anyone who wants to study the cosmos should be able to, regardless of their background.” Early on in her journey to the stars, Silverman felt isolated as one of the only women in her college classes during her undergraduate studies at UC Santa Cruz. It was then that she decided she would work to remove that barrier, both for herself and for future generations of physicists:

“I created a vision for my future self as an astrophysicist who works hard to change the climate in the field,” said Silverman, who brought her vision to UC Irvine when she started here in 2019. “It’s a privilege to do this work, and I recognize that I am able to do it in part because of the privilege that I hold as a white, cisgendered and abled person with two parents who attended college.”

In 2020, Silverman became the administrator of the Rising Stargirls outreach program, which provides opportunities for middle school girls from underrepresented backgrounds to learn about physics and astronomy. For her efforts in the realm of diversity, equity and inclusion, Maya received UCI School of Physical Sciences’ Women in Natural Sciences award, an honor that aims to foster the next generation of women leaders in science.

Read more of the article on UC Irvine‘s School of Physical Sciences news. Congratulations, Maya! Way to shoot for the moon!

Harvest Season

sharing our many blessings & gratitude within our community and beyond

An abundance of sweet smelling lavender was recently donated from various SF Waldorf families‘ gardens and prepared by the 4th graders for Winter Fair projects.

Schoolwide food drive, with coordination efforts by Grade 7, meant families served by Raphael House in San Francisco had food on their table for Thanksgiving. Thanks to all SFWS families that donated!

The annual Harvest Dinner on the high school campus this year culminated Grade 3’s farming/food block. Students read from gratitude scrolls, thanking their parents, and families shared a meal.

maya silverman, astrophysicist, sfwhs class of 2015

Maya Silverman. Photo: UCI School of Physical Sciences

For the principles and practices

Why did your parents choose Waldorf education for you?

My parents were both artists with a counter cultural bent that moved to San Francisco from the midwest in the 1970s. They had firm, strongly-held views on many cultural traditions and practices and hoped to create a family and community that could flourish separate from what they viewed as the trappings of post war, suburban America. They found SF Waldorf School, which was under ten years old at the time and already featured a strong, enticing set of founding principals, firm policies that promoted romantic ideals and anti-consumerism, policies that aligned neatly with their own.

My parents separated during my first year of kindergarten and the school really became a huge source of stability for me personally. The idyllic, magical campus truly became a home away from home and the incredible, brilliant, teachers became parent figures and mentors, many of whom still work or participate in the community today.

What is your fondest or strongest memory of your time at SF Waldorf

School?

It’s so much a part of my identity that it’s difficult to incapsulate everything in one anecdote. I will say that our eighth grade trip on the Green Tortoise bus to the National Parks of the south west was particularly memorable. It was an incredible way to connect with the landscape and my classmates on the verge of adolescence. To this day, I look back on that trip as a kind of capstone of my childhood.

Do you still remain in contact with your Kindergarten teacher, class teacher, or classmates from your time here?

I had Monique [Grund] and Dagmar [Eisele] for Kindergarten, Joan Caldarera from first to fifth grade and Susan Cook for sixth through eighth. I remain in contact with all of them. I still cherish my relationship with my teachers, and my classmates are still my closest friends.

What do you hope your child will take away or acquire from her time at SFWS?

As I write this, my daughter is two months into her first year of Kindergarten and I’ve already seen the effects. The curriculum and its commitment to ceremony and tangible, tactile aesthetics have absolutely supercharged her imagination and appreciation for things profound and sacred. My hope is that I can encourage her sense of magic and meaning and help foster the tools that will allow her to resist the exploitative trappings of commercial culture.

What is the school doing right today to meet the unique times and the children’s needs?

The Waldorf principal of keeping the childhood experience as sacred as possible is an ideal that I firmly believe in. When I think about the difficulties of raising a child in our modern world I think most about the search for inner balance. I am not anti-technology. Far from it. I do however, think it requires a great deal of personal awareness and self knowledge to stay grounded in these times, particularly for developing minds. It seems like a lot to ask of a child, when confronted with the stimulating design and comfort of modern technology, to separate the utilitarian applications from its addictive and corrupting qualities. I imagine there are benefits to familiarizing certain children to screens and social media at a young age, but I think the negative effects can be profoundly destructive. In this sense, I think SF Waldorf is exceptionally suitable for my daughter, growing up here in the Bay Area, which is such a world class epicenter of technological innovation and commerce.

Alex Murray-Clark while at SFWGS

q & a wtih alex murray clark, artist, sfwgs alumni & kindergarten parent

How has an SF Waldorf education prepared you for your career?

I am an artist and a painter, and I can say with confidence that I would have been an artist had I gone to Waldorf or any other school. However, Waldorf’s unique approach to painting and drawing played a role in my artistic vocabulary. I grew up in a flat that my family shared with professional cartoonists. Their work made a huge impression on me as a young child and stood diametrically opposed to the aesthetic principals taught in Waldorf education. Content aside, my cartoonist neighbors’ style of cartooning is based on outlines, continuity, and saturated colors. Waldorf, on the other hand teaches wet on wet watercolor, a unique form of stippling (short mark making) and a particular form of transparent glazing called veil painting. While the comic book approach aims to convey action, emotion, and form with maximum impact and clarity, the Waldorf approach asks the viewer to participate in the moodscape, to occupy the space and find yourself within it. The Waldorf approach is about color relationships, the nonliteral, nonpictorial, and the impressionistic approach of sculpting with light. The comic artist is always present within me, but over the years I’ve come to appreciate just how important the Waldorf method is to a developing painter. The principals of getting away from the brush, the avoidance of black and the urge to outline, the appreciation of painterly properties and the sublime, these are the qualities of paintings that endure and inspire me to this day, and it’s something that I couldn’t quite identify before graduating from Waldorf.

What have you seen in your child that reminds you of why you chose to enroll them here, at SFWS, the same school you attended?

The transformation was apparent from day one. She had memorized a new song from a puppet show and promptly reenacted it for us, complete with delicate hand gestures and shifts in tempo. She’s been inspired and inquisitive. She sings and dances spontaneously and has turned into a more thoughtful, gentle girl in a short time. I couldn’t be more proud, and I’m extremely excited for her to embark on her SF Waldorf journey.~

For deeper learning and expansive thinking

q & a with james lipset, u.s. navy lieutenant commander, sfwgs alumni, nursery & grade 1 parent

We chose SF Waldorf as it is similar to Swiss schools where my wife is from. We like the play-based education versus being fed information to memorize. Waldorf education teaches you how to learn and think. You are not just given specific topics to memorize. This allows children to be more wellrounded students when they move into higher education and in life in general. They become adaptable as they are thinking and not just regurgitating what they have been told. Now, as I’m working on ships, it’s impossible to simply just do what the book says as everything is very fluid, and you have to be adaptable. My SFWS education taught me how to think, allowing me to see the whole picture better, not just what was in front of me.

Interview with Marketing Director, Samantha Cosentino per email, November 2022

Alex with daughter Greta

Why did you choose SF Waldorf School for your own children?

Alexander in the traditional Rose Ceremony (one similar to what James would have had), welcoming first graders into grade school.

James helping his son Alexander get settled and ready to enter his classroom at SFWS on his first day of First Grade.

Advancement News

community fund update

Waldorf Alum Connect

more ways to stay connected

Waldorf alumni and their families can find exciting opportunities and offerings on AWSNA‘s Waldorf Alum Connect platform:

• Waldorf Alum Business Directory

• Networking opportunities

• Mentorship and mentee opportunities

The Advancement team recently launched the school’s annual Community Fund campaign with the goal of raising $675,000 and having 100% community participation.

Why is the Community Fund important?

The Community Fund covers programming costs that exceed tuition income to ensure all students have materials and access to our full program. Funds raised through the Community Fund help pay for the festivals that we cherish, the high school musical and Senior play, food for the nursery, class trips, athletics, and so much more. Additionally, it supports our Equitable Tuition Program.

We ask that each family make a contribution that is meaningful to your family. Gifts range from $5 to $100,000. Contact Eric Norman at enorman@sfwaldorf.org to learn more about the Community Fund and ways you can maximize your support.

• Jobs and internships

• Alum parent registration

• Alumni map by location, industry, year

• Plain ol’ fun

Alumni and families can register to connect with community.

Did you know you can now update your SF Waldorf alumni profile and let SF Waldorf know about your life on our website? We‘d love to hear from you!

For a welcoming environment

Continued from page 3

provided that oasis for me the same way it provides my children with what they need now. My son, who graduated last year, can procrastinate, but when he had big projects like a study of Frank Lloyd Wright in 8th grade and printing presses in the 7th grade, he loved it. He spent hours and hours doing the artwork and research. My daughter, a 6th grader, is really enjoying her Physics block right now. She is just a very lovely and kind person. I absolutely credit the school and the teachers for their part in that.~

For creativity

Continued from page 5

They also appreciated the intentionality behind every lesson and inclusion of the spiritual world without being overtly religious.

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SF Waldorf provided a magical world for me to dream, imagine, and create. As an adult, every time I bring Ivy to school, I find myself keenly aware of the smells, warm lighting, wooden furniture, delicately sponge-painted walls, the fresh flowers...my senses bring me back to the joy, magic, and innocence I felt as a child at SF Waldorf. I feel great pride as a mother that I can pass on this experience to Ivy.” ~

SFWS provided a magical world for me to dream, imagine, and create.