It was a town meeting of casino executives, construction-company owners and ad-agency chiefs, defending the right of their children to put on plays. To pet a shaggy dog stretched across the lobby floor on the way to class every day. To learn at their own pace and live free of standardized testing.
Think Madison Avenue meets the Rainbow Gathering. By meeting's end, the practices of the former would be aligned to keep alive the theories of the latter.
A letter announcing the event to parents of Imprints Day School began, "Dear, dear, parents ..."
The meeting was scheduled in the Little Turtle Theater, where students stage the school's signature monthly plays based on the cultures of other countries. The impromptu PTA, ripped from a few pages of who's who in the Valley, faced, the letter said, "a single-item agenda ... to explore the financial reality of the continuation of [the school] as it currently exists."
The theater quickly filled with about 100 parents and teachers, more than half the school's families. Early on, one mother reacted to the piling-on of bad news about the school's bottom line. "I don't think anybody knew you weren't taking a salary," she said, pointing at Lillie Englund and Sheri Kaminski, founders and directors of the private school in Henderson, which appeared on that January night to be on the verge of shutting down.
Tobias Mattstedt, parent and vice president of development at MGM Mirage, stood on the stage that his children had occupied days earlier. He laid out the school's troubles on a block of paper propped against an easel.
Imprints owed $80,000 in taxes. And there was that business of salaries, which had gone on for a few years now. And the way Kaminski's husband, Jerry, had long been draining money from his construction company to keep the school afloat. Eight years after becoming only the third nonreligious private elementary school in the fastest-growing urban center in the country, "that hippie school," as Kaminski said it was often called, that "mini-Fame," was facing certain death.
Englund and Kaminski had tried to sell the school to someone interested in keeping the arts-heavy, project-based, mixed-age-classrooms school intact. But nothing had panned out, and with a new year arriving, the two decided to call a town meeting of sorts, to break the news to parents.
The parents revolted. Selling, or losing, Imprints, was not an option.
One after the other, they testified with love about how their children had learned the three R's while having fun, through projects such as the monthly plays, and not by rote memorization.
They threw out possible solutions ranging from paying six months of the $800 monthly tuition in advance to devising a marketing campaign that would draw new families to the school. As emotions reached a pitch, one woman looked at the school's founders and implored, "Are you going to stay on and take care of our babies? Our grandbabies?"
Kaminski, who later said her mind was already "in a car, 80 miles on my way to the coast," answered: Yes.
Our family of four had come across the cultural oddity that is Imprints only seven months earlier. It was June, the start of another desert summer, and Jesse, my older son, was still mourning the departure of both his teachers from Montessori Children's World, a school that had seen him learn English and helped him feel at home in the U.S. after we moved here from Colombia in 2001. It was a typical Las Vegas tale—forming close relationships only to see them dissolve when the other person moves on. Jesse had also been fortunate because my wife, Joana, taught arts and Spanish at the school.
We began steeling ourselves to the idea of a public-school education. Though many people I know said that many public schools here have loving, committed teachers, I found the notion unsettling. I linked it to the idea of learning simply to pass tests; to the federal government codifying children's progress like so many quarterly stock reports under the No Child Left Behind Act; not to mention that peculiar artifact of contemporary U.S. life, labeling children's behaviors as psychological disorders to be fixed by prescription. It probably has something to do with my own countercultural upbringing, which includes counting a Hell's Angel named Chocolate George among my babysitters when I was a preschooler.
A friend recommended we visit Imprints.
Right off the lobby, to the left, two doors opened onto a theater—a real theater, with a stage, lights, room for an audience. Joana's eyes opened wide—she had studied in arts schools since she was a child in Colombia, going on to work in scenic design.
The building was large enough, with six classrooms and other spaces, to have those long hallways I remember from schooling, that long trip to the bathroom. The hallways were lined with two tanks, one with fish, another with a turtle. Off to the right, there was a library without doors, a nook. If you peeked inside the classrooms, it was clear they were Montessori-style mixed-age classrooms, and you weren't going to see rows and lines of desks, even in rooms with older children. There was room to play out back, with fruit trees, vegetables and a compost heap, tended to part of the time by the children. And there was Sydney, the dog that welcomes your touch, with one blue eye and one brown eye.
It seemed wonderful, but out of reach. Still, at the end of our tour, not exactly shy, I asked Sheri—that's what everyone calls her—"Would you be looking for a teacher trained in arts and theater?"
They were.
Five months and five plays into the school year, 9-year-old Jesse was painting vases and horses, reading books at home, memorizing lines ... and his brother, Dylan, at 4, was beginning to get along in groups, write his name, learn the alphabet and sort through colors.
Every day, Dylan stopped at the fish tank where "there's a fish that's fat and it's orange" to pucker up against the glass. The fish did the same.
And now the school was ready to fold.
So what do a bunch of uber-capitalists do to save a hippie school? First, they form committees and have meetings. Marketing, finance and fund-raising committees sketched plans during the following weeks, membership shrinking as busy parents got pulled in other directions. Immediate responses included committee members and other parents dipping further into their own pockets. Money began appearing in the bank. To-do lists were scratched off.
In a room off the lobby one late spring day, Sheri sat down, followed by Sydney. She noted how far away some of that meeting's problems now seemed. About 30 parents had paid midyear registration fees in advance. Six families had paid an entire year's tuition. The school's financial statements were up-to-date.
"The main conclusion: We're not going anywhere," the youthful administrator, in jeans and T-shirt, said. Parents had gone further than their own checkbooks, transforming themselves into a team of consultants that would have cost the school a fortune otherwise. A parent whose events company had 6,265 friends on MySpace had helped the school launch its first real website, replacing a stalled effort left behind years ago. Though only up three weeks at the time, the site already had produced three requests for tours, Sheri said. Another parent had worked on "keyword optimization," making sure the school's website popped up on search engines.
As for fund-raising, there was talk of a Christmas dinner show to raise money. (Rather organically, the students themselves had done a "save the school" jog-a-thon, raising $7,000 for supplies.)
These sorts of things had never been part of the school's plan before. "We've never done any organized marketing; never had a budget. It's always been word of mouth," she said.
In short measure she remembered events nearly 20 years earlier. Becoming a parent to her daughter Autumn Joy compelled her to take child-development classes, which one day led her to observe a day-care center .... where Englund was in charge. "She was doing amazing things," Sheri recalled.
With the serendipity that seems to characterize Imprints stories, that very day a worker at the center quit. So began Sheri's 10 years of working with Englund at La Petite Academy.
One day in 1995, Lillie—the suit-wearing, more cerebral half of the duo—asked her partner, "If we had our own school, what would it look like?" Sheri answered, "It would have big windows with no blinds, so the kids could see out of them. And it would have a theater program with a real stage and props."
"Suddenly, we were on fire."
By July 1998, the school had been built. "And still we had no marketing," she said, rounding off her tale.
On a separate day months later, Englund made a few points in a methodical manner befitting her second "job" as a Ph.D. student in special education at UNLV. First, she said, "Hippieness gets misinterpreted, or can lead to misinterpretations. All of the basis for the school has come out of the best practices as far as what is best for children." She dropped the names of educational philosophers as some would MVP shortstops: Dewey, Montessori ... "We're interested in allowing a child to remain a thinker," she said.
A story followed, about fleas and how they learn not to jump too high if you put them in a covered jar, and how children also "learn" not to think past their grade level if you "teach" them, and ... off she went, framing each thought with careful hands.
They're the same native Vermonter hands that flip pancakes for dozens twice a year at the school's parent-teacher-student campout, held under the mesquite and fruit trees behind Imprints, the 215 Beltway humming in the background.
Learning is living "on the cutting edge of boredom and frustration—unfortunately that gets misinterpreted to mean letting children do whatever they want," she said.
As for saving Imprints, she allowed that pulling parents into the process of selling, and ultimately, helping to run the school, was needed.
"I'm an educator, not a salesperson. Parents know how to articulate [to each other] what they need," she said.
A few weeks earlier, in late July, two of those parents had introduced themselves to the school's teaching staff as members of the new board of directors, a group that may grow to nine members, including Kaminski and Englund.
The meeting's agenda was everything but the curriculum and other aspects of what the teachers do with the students, and rather was a coming-out of sorts for the board, plus a review of some new nuts-and-bolts policies. Renee Aschoff, whose day job is campaign manager for Rep. Shelley Berkley, stood before the several dozen teachers in the same theater where the journey to save the school began months earlier. She said the parents were "committed to seeing that you're happy—financially, with benefits and materials. We support your role."
Within minutes, Aschoff, a peppy, bright-smiling sort, was breaking the news about how the school had lacked structure, or in some cases procedures weren't being followed ... for example, in what teachers wear.
So began what may have been the longest stretch of an hour-plus meeting, as teachers dissected the announcement for hidden meanings, such as whether tie-dye was still allowed (yes), or if there could be an exception to a prohibition on open-toed shoes (maybe).
"The way you present yourself says a lot about who you are," Englund said afterward, and the school had to consider more than ever before how it presented itself to the outside community. "We like you, we know what a great teacher you are—now we need to show everyone else what a great teacher you are. It's the projection of what we are to a wider community," she concluded.
Also announced: a change in freebies for teachers. New hires would only get 50 percent off tuition for their children, instead of 100 percent. Teachers would have to begin paying a fee for the materials their children used in class.
On the good-news side, the school had finally put its name in the phone book. And the parent committees had arranged for the school to begin advertising on local movie theater screens. Englund said the school, like its students, "is growing up."
One of the few men on staff at Imprints still wears his tie-dye T-shirts to work, often paired with a bandana on his head.
Keith Alcantara, nine years in Las Vegas, born in Queens, New York, is the school cook. He's a musician who has always worked at delis, in restaurants. The kitchen door is usually open, and on many mornings you can hear noodling guitar lines from the Grateful Dead on his tape deck.
He discovered the school on a website for people like him who like to meet for drum circles. Sheri was one of those people. She posted an announcement for a cook on the site. Meeting Sheri, he said, "It was a familiar vibe, a familiar soul." More serendipity.
That was in March. In addition to baking cookies and boiling pasta, Alcantara has given a few drum workshops to the students, about which he said he had "never seen so many kids so responsive."
As for the school's near-death and revival, he said, "Any change is growth. It almost seems like it has to go that way."
Of course, not everyone in a community takes to change in the same way.
Erica Thursz-Zuckerman, a 37-year-old massage therapist at Caesars Palace, enrolled her 7-year-old son, Jonathan, and 4-year-old daughter, Eva, two years ago. The New York transplant wanted her children "to have some semblance of culture" growing up in Las Vegas, a city she called a "different world ... not like the East Coast, where [culture] is in the air."
And the school gave her a lot, she said, a fact she noticed, perhaps with irony, on a summer trip back to New York, where her son "had discourse with 30- and 40-year-olds about paintings at the Guggenheim." She said her son, in part due to his time at Imprints, "is more well-rounded than 95 percent of the children I run across." She also noted that Sheri and Lillie had been more than a little understanding when she fell behind in her tuition payments on occasion.
But now the strain on her finances, together with the school's moves to form a board, made her enroll her son in a magnet school and her daughter in a different private school.
Her fears? "The board is the people who have the money and the time," she said. "Having money doesn't make you the smartest. And it looks like the parents may be making the decisions about my children's education—not the founders.
"The worst thing would be not understanding and integrating all the things these two women have accomplished, making it like every other private school," Thursz-Zuckerman said.
She allowed that part of her fears may come from "a lack of communication. They could have communicated months ago about who this board is and what they were doing," she said. Other parents have said they feel a bit out of the loop about what their fellow parents have been doing in all those meetings since January.
Parent Lisa Mogel, who is also on the board and is the president of a local chapter of Mommy and Me, a nonprofit group of mothers and children, said that all parents at the school were invited to take part in shaping the school's future, as she decided she would on the night of January 31.
At the same time, "We try to put a grass-roots feeling into what we're doing and ask, ‘What do we all want for our children?'" The board member said she and other parents have been researching the concepts underpinning the school. She burst through a list of ideas: collaborative learning, something called "edutopia," children participating in their learning, the failures of public education—all with the enthusiasm of someone who's found something she is convinced works.
Englund said the board "is very clear and adamant that Imprints stay the same as far as educational philosophy."
Several weeks later, I brought to our conversations a piece of my background we share: Vermont. I lived and studied there decades ago, a college student at one of the nation's smallest institutions of higher learning, Marlboro College. That school walks a path similar to that of Imprints—a small community of learning that isn't afraid to try something new, but has rigorous expectations for its students, while encouraging them to develop as individuals.
It also has faced financial peril, precisely because chasing those ideals is expensive, and not for everyone, a fact compounded perhaps by the prevailing desire in our society to seek something more than "remaining a thinker," which Englund is convinced is what it takes to be a leader and a productive member of society.
We talked about other Vermont projects that had grappled with these same challenges, including the back-to-the-land farms run by extended families of friends that once dotted the state's mountains.
My mind turned back to the desert. There's an inescapable irony that a project like Imprints should be seated in this valley, as it slowly but surely goes under a sea of Spanish-tiled roofs all the same, at its center a row of places meant to make you think of elsewhere, drawing people's wallets from around the world.
Jesse came home from school the other day, one of the last in the school's summer session, excited about having found a small plant in the yard behind the school. "I was playing and I saw it and knew that it was a mesquite tree," he said in the breathless way children speak of their days.
"We dug it up and planted it in a pot in the classroom. We saved the tree."
I would expect nothing less.