Tuesday, May 25, was opening night for the hotly-awaited Middle School play, “To Kill a Mockingbird.” This year’s production featured several important “first’s”: It was the first time the play hasn’t featured music; the first time TBS used Live Oak Theater in Berkeley; and the first time that someone other than Associate Head of School Zaq Roberts directed. Drama and sixth grade Humanities teacher Norman Johnson took on the Herculean task this year, and with Christopher Sergel’s stage adaptation of Harper Lee’s classic novel, showed that he was more than up to filling Zaq’s shoes as director. This challenging play is impressively performed by the young actors; as Norman wrote in the program notes, “Like Lee, I am puzzled by the resistant quality of the anti-black racism that took root in this nation in which I have lived for thirty years. However, I am also thrilled that I can live and work in a community that does not blink when they see a young African American actress play a white male lawyer, a black convict being played by an South Asian actor, or two students of different races play the same character as a young girl and an adult. The culture of the middle school at TBS is one where it is possible to use colorblind casting to put on a play that deals poignantly with race, without anybody batting an eyelash. This is truly Berkeley, where the radical is the casual. And this is truly The Berkeley School, where the tradition of middle school students bringing the quickness of their creativity to the stage each spring lives on.”

A hot lunch program where our students could eat together in community and deeply learn the pleasures of eating nutritious and delicious food, and where they could be steeped in a seed-to-table ethos of eating local and organic food, was a long-time dream of Janet Stork, our late Head of School. After seeing the wonderful program run by Steve and Kate’s Camp, who began renting space at TBS last summer, Janet was inspired to explore ways to make that dream a reality. She recruited some like-minded parents and staff members and helped plan the hot lunch pilot program our Elementary/Middle School students enjoyed in January, 2010. After Janet had to step down, the committee pushed on, building on the success of the pilot program and soliciting volumes of feedback from parents and staff to research the nuts and bolts of how such a program might actually work at TBS. Now parent Gina Tega-Partovi has begun a blog, to keep the community informed and up-to-date on the activities of the committee. Please visit http://tbseatsmart.blogspot.com to learn more, stay abreast of the plan (called “Eat Smart”) as it develops, and voice your opinion.

In recognition of Janet’s passionate belief in the primary importance of professional development for teachers, The Janet Stork Memorial Fund for Teaching and Learning has been established at The Berkeley School in her memory. This fund will enable teachers from TBS, and from other local schools lacking adequate resources, to participate in local and national meetings, conferences, and other professional development opportunities centered around new progressive educational research. Additionally, the fund will be used to centralize Janet’s personal collection of educational resources in a single library on the TBS site.

Donations can be sent in care of The Berkeley School, 1310 University Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94702.

Saturday, April 10, will surely go down in TBS annals as a high point of our community’s energy, resolve, generosity, and openheartedness. Determined to honor the memory of our late Head of School, Janet Stork, who loved a good party almost as much as she loved the work of education, we pulled ourselves together and turned out in greater numbers, and raised more money, than we ever have before. We grossed about $100,000 for our teachers’ professional development, while enjoying each other and the wonderful space at the Craneway Pavilion. Dinner by Gregoire was predictably fabulous; the surroundings — an Italian piazza transplanted to the Richmond waterfront, courtesy of Mark Kohr, Marian Bradley-Kohr, and Elisabeth Ross — took our breath away; and some of us shook a little more than we’d planned when Lawrence Patrick started spinning tunes — everything from ABBA to Kelis. We were called to dinner by a long blast from a didjeridoo; we held babies while we danced; we endangered our children’s college funds to support the auction’s cause; and we made new friends while we reconnected with old ones. TBS thanks everyone who helped bring the auction to life, especially Auction Chair Signy Judd, as well as everyone who attended. See you next year!

The Berkeley School is deeply saddened to announce the death on April 5, 2010 of former Head of School Janet Stork. Janet joined TBS, then Berkeley Montessori School, in the summer of 2006. During her years at the helm, she was a true change agent, moving our school away from a strict Montessori pedagogy to a more inclusive research-based program that incorporates the best of current educational thinking. Janet’s professional experience was broad and always intellectually focused on effective teaching. She began her career as an early childhood and elementary teacher, moving into administration at schools such as Eliot Pearson Children’s School at Tufts University, her alma mater, and Dalton School in N.Y. She was a foundational contributor to Project Zero at Harvard, working closely with Howard Gardner and others on a variety of subjects such as assessment, documentation, and curricula based on the framework of multiple intelligences. Her colleague from Project Zero, Mara Krechevsky, wrote, “Janet Stork was an outstanding educational leader, critical and creative thinker, and researcher who traveled easily between the worlds of educational theory and practice, finding innovative and creative ways to bridge the two. As someone grounded in the research side of the field, I greatly admired Janet’s ability to make the newest findings in educational research relevant and accessible to teachers. Early on, Janet identifed key implications of the Reggio approach for instruction and assessment, not just for American early childhood education, but for education at all levels.” The world of education has lost a profound thinker and researcher, and TBS has lost a transformational leader and beloved friend. Our deepest sympathies go out to Janet’s children, Andrew and Catie Birnberg, whose compassion and courage attest to their mother’s many gifts as a parent. Read the reflections of our current Head, Mitch Bostian, in his weekly letter, here, on sharing space with Janet’s library for the past month.