How Hurricane Sandy Helped Shape a Ritual of Gratitude of Blue School

One of the great joys of being at Blue School throughout its life has been being in a community that has taken on the great responsibility of creating rituals in a new school and seeing what takes root. Some rituals have come and gone (does anyone remember the yearly recycled-paper-snowball-exchange?), some rituals get stronger every year (like the beautiful Oratorical Festival in January), some make me weepy just thinking about them (our disco ball drop and Auld Lang Syne singalong before winter break transport me to community meetings with my 5 year old kiddo on my lap, and later to watching my 8th grader sing, full of the knowledge that this was their last time to sing this song with these friends). Rituals make our growth visible.

Back in 2012, we were having conversations about how to best celebrate Halloween as a community. In previous years, we had tried a healthy Halloween dance party, and we had tried individual classroom celebrations; but in 2012, we decided that it could be really special to focus our costume building for the Big Studies that were unfolding in our classrooms. Throughout October, students created masks of Greek gods and Brooklyn Bridge hats. They made bird wings and togas. They prepared for a Big Study Costume Parade to take place on Halloween. But 2012 was the year of Hurricane Sandy. The hurricane hit New York on October 29th and our school and our dear neighborhood were flooded. Our neighbors couldn’t get into their homes. Businesses were shuttered. Although Blue School recovered very quickly and we were able to open our doors when the mayor re-opened public schools, we re-opened in a neighborhood that was reeling.

As the weeks passed and we all tried to get back to a sense of normalcy, teachers had a beautiful idea: a GRATITUDE PARADE. We decided to spend the last half hour of the Tuesday before Thanksgiving parading through the neighborhood in our Big Study costumes. We wrote letters to neighbors and shopkeepers and thanked them for all that they do for our community. We invited them to join us in the courtyard in front of Bowne Printers so that we could all sing together. We stood there, in handmade costumes a month after Halloween, so deeply grateful to be together, so grateful that the storm had passed, so grateful that re-building was happening. We sang “I’m So Glad I’m Here” and “Open the Circle” and “Imagine,” and in that parading and gathering and singing, a ritual was born.

At Blue School we do not dress up in school for Halloween on October 31st. (Of course, many of us dress up right after school!) We do not have a Halloween parade of costumes that day. But on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, we all put on our carefully handmade hats or capes or masks that tell the story of our learning. We walk around the neighborhood. We gather in front of Bowne and we sing with our neighbors. We hope you’ll be there singing along with us.

Dawn Williams

Director of Admissions