Frequently Asked Questions

School hours are from 10am to 4pm, Monday through Friday, from September to June. Science says teens need to sleep in! We follow the SB Unified calendar, plus a little extra vacation. 

Our campus is in downtown Santa Barbara– we’re moving for the new school year ’24/’25! Stay tuned for an update once we’re established at our new location. 

Students are presented with the school’s operating funds at the beginning of the year, and are tasked with creating a budget by consensus. They collectively create policies and procedures to allocate and spend those funds, and use them to administer SB Free’s programs. 

At the start of each semester, or whenever it is appropriate, staff and students gather at School Meeting to brainstorm around areas of learning, organize students into different activities, and set the semester’s schedule. 

Our students principally organize into 6 types of activities:

Classes are student initiated and organized, but led by an adult educator on or off-campus. Students participating in our Dual Enrollment program with SBCC opt to take college credit classes, following their academic interests to a deeper level. Examples on-campus include “American Values throughout US History,” “Ceramics,” and “Conversational Spanish” while students in the Dual Enrollment Program have access to the entire SBCC catalogue.

Cooperatives are student initiated, organized, and led. These develop from the passions and interests of a group of likeminded students who take on the responsibility of creating the curriculum and leading the activity. Examples include Woodworking, Rock Climbing, and Geo-Cooking. 

Working Groups are research initiatives begun by students to ask big questions, engage in critical dialogue, and make recommendations to the School Meeting regarding policies or plans. An example is the “AI Working Group,” delving into the changes that artificial intelligence is bringing to education and the working world, and how to incorporate AI into our democratic model.

Personal projects are driven by individual students, may or may not be collaborative, and represent a way for our students to dive deep into their personal passions. Project time is typically a discreet time in the schedule so that students have unstructured, purposeful time to themselves. 

Workshops and Seminars are just the thing when students want to explore a variety of related topics, or hear from a series of interesting speakers. In our “Life Skills Seminar” students organized an ongoing series of speakers to present on topics like Personal Finance and Investing, Wilderness Survival, and Professional Skills.

Internship, apprenticeship, and entrepreneurship are all exciting ways to learn at SB Free. Students are encouraged to pursue their interests outside of the classroom; learning professional skills and building a compelling transcript along the way. Students are facilitated by educators and partners from across our community who bring decades of experience and professional connections. 

SB Free serves as a venue in which any curriculum and/or learning methods and modalities may be utilized, including off-campus learning (college courses, internships and apprenticeships, employment, etc).

The skills that students develop to thrive at SB Free are found in every profession– leadership, goal-setting, autonomy, scheduling and budgeting, professional communication, time management, teamwork. They get to practice life and develop skills across numerous domains essential for creating a fulfilling life. What results is a healthy life balance full of study, athletics, creative expression, craft, outdoor exploration, and community engagement. 

They look like a lot of fun! Every semester, students are tasked with creating our schedule. It evolves out of the classes, coops, working groups, and projects that they create. So, unlike conventional school, our schedule is responsive and flexible. Check out the section “What is the curriculum?” for more on that process. 

For example, in our last school year the students created a schedule with a really healthy work/life balance. In the morning we met for classes. Then we broke for lunch and afterwards project time. The rest of the afternoon was devoted to coop activities that needed more time such as athletics, art, or craft. If students didn’t elect to join any of these activities, they were free to use their time at school however they pleased. Some worked on personal projects, some played games, others who were certified went off campus to explore downtown Santa Barbara. In practice, there are so many fun and engaging activities going on that students find themselves caught up in the whirlwind! The days go by fast.

Conventional schooling reduces learning to bite-size curricular objectives packaged into lessons and “delivered” to students in classes without experiential context. It’s a fine way to study and acquire some knowledge, among many ways. It has some advantages, such as optimizing the expense of teacher’s time, and it has some drawbacks, such as being relatively ineffective and boring for many students much of the time. Regrettably, this method dominates conventional schooling to the exclusion of other methods – so much so, that the word “learning” has come to be widely associated with this one overused method, applied to the standard academic curriculum.

Free Schools restore the meaning of “learning” to include many learning methods and domains of learning. Check out our page on Self-Direction to learn about all the kinds of programming generated in our community, and be sure to check out the College Cooperative page for more info on our college dual-enrollment program.

Free School students sometimes learn in the same ways they do in conventional schools. More often, though, democratic school students learn in a variety of ways, enhanced by self-directed and community dynamics. The result is learning that is more meaningful and enduring, and daily life that is more fulfilling.

Have you ever studied for a test, only to forget the content as soon as the test is taken? You got the grade, but what about the education? Mandatory curriculum harms young people’s learning, intelligence, and joy of life in many ways: it displaces better developmental opportunities, promotes shallow learning, turns kids off to academics, undermines introspection and self-awareness, deadens initiative, fosters passivity, disempowers kids and alienates them from adults.

We reject the vision of a standard sequence of learning steps that leads every child from kindergarten to college to economic prosperity. In recognizing that each young person’s development is unique and unpredictable— influenced by infinite variations in cultural, environmental, and personal factors— we place our trust in their knowing, in their choices, and in their pursuit of happiness. We are right by their sides, as mentors, to help realize each young person’s unique promise.

First and foremost, students at SB Free learn to love learning. They learn how to take an interest, find the resources they need, and study it. So when a new skill, say calculus, becomes eventually relevant– our students have the experience to pick it up. 

On a very practical level, our students who are college-bound will set that goal during their high school years and work to build an impressive transcript that sets them above their conventionally-schooled peers by taking college credit classes and diving deep into passions that demonstrate mature goal-setting and achievement. But that misses the point.

 Young people want learn what they’re interested in, what they need to learn in order to function in their world, what their peers are up to, and what they must learn in order to achieve self-chosen goals. At the Free School school, they learn these things more deeply, joyfully, and durably than is likely in conventional schools. 

What do they learn? At SB Free, young people have the chance to develop cognition, general intelligence, and critical thinking as they practice life in a stew of culture, community, nature, and technology. Instead of worksheets and word problems, or sometimes in addition to them, students tackle personally meaningful challenges – social, emotional, physical, intellectual, political, situational, and existential. 

Self-directed education cultivates introspection, self-awareness, initiative, decision-making, resourcefulness, and resilience. Community cultivates collaboration, awareness of others, and life skills for navigating society. Collective self-governance and school administration cultivate authority, political sensibility, policy awareness, and public mindedness. Through it all, learning and self-management become fulfilling lifelong practice.

Students are encouraged to pursue their interests and passions outside of school grounds. If those activities fall within school hours, we ask that they show respect and acknowledge their responsibility to the school community by requesting permission from the group at the weekly School Meeting. These outside activities are encouraged. As long as students make time for the weekly school meeting, and participate in meaningful ways at school, they are given all the support and resources they could ask for, to pursue their interests.

They can learn it! Our school’s structure is designed to lower the barrier to entry, so that young people are empowered to learn as widely or deeply as they want. It usually starts in a brainstorming session, “I want to learn French” or “does anyone else want to try coding in Python?” Then the conversation shifts… how many are interested? Is this a student led Coop activity or should we search for a teacher or outside resource? If it’s a class should it be in person, off-campus, online… at middle, high school, or college level? Who do we want to learn from and how should the class function? What are our goals for learning?

As these questions get answered, students and staff collaborate to put the plan into action. Maybe the best thing to do is use open source MIT Courseware to take that Python class, or perhaps we should bring in a fluent French speaker to lead a conversational immersion course. Maybe we should go to France. Sometimes the curiosity manifests as a series of lectures with different speakers; sometimes it means exploring deep into the Santa Barbara backcountry. Unlike in conventional school, it rarely looks like the same thing from semester to semester, year after year. 

If one of our students has a personal passion that they want to pursue alone, be it oil painting or videogame design, playwriting or machine-learning algorithms, we are there to help set goals, reflect on process, and celebrate the joys of learning on your own terms. 

SB Free is going phone-free for the 2024/25 school year. Screen time is a complicated and divisive issue. Tech literacy is a vital skill in today’s– and especially tomorrow’s– world. However, we understand that screen time and social media are associated serious with mental and emotional health difficulties. Even at the Free School, student input ends with matters of health and safety. Last year we couldn’t find consensus on how to approach the issue of phones disrupting our culture, so this year we’re are acting for the health of our community by restricting phones in school. 

We looked to Jonathan Haidt’s excellent, “The Anxious Generation” for perspective, and urge you to check out the research hosted on his site. He advocates for “four norms” that address both symptoms and causes: No smartphones before high school, no social media before 16, phone-free schools, and more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world. We find these recommendations timely, correct, and critically important. 

Students will check their devices at the door, but will be free to return to them and use them any time throughout the day. Phones will not, however, be carried on one’s person. We hope to inspire a conversation around how to use these powerful tools appropriately and skillfully, how to opt in and out consciously, and how to develop self-care and mindfulness to navigate these strong cultural currents. 

Democratic school graduates go on to colleges and universities at the same rates as their conventionally-schooled peers. In short, self-directed learners have a demonstrated ability to define their own passions, set their own goals, and achieve them. 

This is the type of learning that students will be asked to do at the college level– for many public school students, it’ll be for the first time. For self-directed learners, college can be a natural continuation of the path they’ve already set for themselves– and their experiences demonstrate that. 

However, we want to shift the conversation about college and interrogate the assumptions about success, financial prosperity, and happiness which underlie that conversation. 

There are many definitions of success, many paths to financial prosperity, and many practices that create happiness; too many to count. It does our young people a great disservice when we try to define those ideas for them: we narrow the scope of their ambition and accomplishment, and we deprive the world of their unique contributions. At SB Free, students can begin living their lives on a trajectory that carries them seamlessly out of school and into the world, as they continually define and redefine their own values, and live a life worthy of those values. 

First and foremost, the majority of our students participate in our college dual-enrollment program, so they will leave high school with much more college experience than their conventionally schooled peers. Our students take those classes because they want to get traditional academic experience, build college credit, and learn academic subjects (it’s exciting when you get to choose it!). Some of our students will graduate with enough credit to transfer into college as a sophomore or a junior.

In a broader sense, Free School graduates tend to adapt to college more easily than their peers from conventional schools. The pattern is striking, and we hear it over and over. In conventional schooling, students commonly get the message that they should sit down, keep quiet, wait for a teacher to tell them what to do, and then do exactly what they are told. These are the messages conveyed by the system itself, communicated to students regardless of teachers’ best intentions.

In contrast, Free School students build their lives on intrinsically motivated pursuits, supported and constrained by the community around them, without adults directing and enforcing. They become self-responsible and accustomed to overcoming obstacles to reach goals and build fulfilling lives. The independence and self-responsibility of college come easily to our students, because they’ve been practicing it throughout their school years. When self-directed graduates go on to college, they adapt quickly and smoothly, sometimes bewildered by their peers’ struggles with self-direction and time management.

Yes. A fundamental component of education at SB Free is our mentorship program. At the beginning of the year, students select a staff member as their mentor. This staff member will be the primary contact for parents, a crucial part of any conflict resolution process that may occur, and most importantly a personal and confidential resource for each student.

Students and their mentor are required to meet once a week, but may opt to meet as regularly as they like. Topics are decided collaboratively between mentor and student. Some possible topics for discussion could be: interests and passions, goal-setting, planning, organization, finding resources, creating resumes or transcripts. resolving interpersonal conflicts at home or at school, organizing Co-ops or Affinity Groups, or anything that the student wants to connect about. 

It is the privilege and responsibility of the mentor to develop a relationship of trust and guidance that a student can rely on when they need it. While mentors serve as a liaison between family and school, they also maintain a firm commitment to the confidentiality of the child’s activities while at school in order to protect the child’s autonomy and preserve the trust between child and mentor.

This, however, is only our formal mentorship program. A central tenant of age-mixing is that students are free to mentor or seek mentorship, formally and informally, from anyone in the community at any time. At democratic schools the sharing, learning, and “teaching” flows up, down, and all around. 

No. Instead, we build a deep capacity for self-reflection and self-assessment through our structure and in our mentorship program.

A student’s mentor can absolutely be a guide and reference for them, if they opt to use their mentor that way. A mentor or staff member can also help a student create a transcript, apply for a job or school, and most importantly help them reflect on their own experiences and goals. Our mentors hold Parent Conferences each semester, to share what’s going on at school and to plan how to best support their student.

But there is no formal assessment of students: ranking and grading are counterproductive and harmful acts that undermine deep learning. Absence of mandatory assessment makes several wholesome results more likely. First, teens develop strong self-assessment habits and introspective skills. Second, they more freely seek and absorb meaningful feedback, gaining ability and confidence in their original thinking. Third, teen’s natural curiosity and motivation are preserved – habits of growth, rather than action to please adults.

Please see our Admissions page for a description of the process and all relevant paperwork.

Prospective students are evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Our program is not equipped to handle a student who experiences severe difficulties in learning independently or in self-correcting negative behaviors. While we welcome neurodiverse students, we are not qualified to provide specialized mental health support. All our students need to be able to care for their own basic needs and remain safe without constant adult supervision. They also need to be able to consistently respond to dialogue and questions. Our experience is that many students previously diagnosed with a “special need” can thrive in our setting, provided they have chosen to be here and their family trusts them to be in charge of their own education.

For many students diagnosed with ADD/ADHD, schools like ours have been a sanctuary. Here, when you need to move, you can move, when you need to go outside, you can go outside, and when you need to switch activities, you can switch. Our program allows these students to shift not only their self-image from disabled to empowered, it also allows them to capitalize on their remarkable strengths.

Students traditionally considered “gifted” are able to move at their own (accelerated) pace at our school. Perhaps more importantly, they are freed of the “gifted” label and the tremendous yet often narrow expectations that label confers. They are able to acquire the “soft” skills which will support them in using their intellectual abilities effectively and responsibly.

Yes. We do not require or collect vaccination records. 

We have regular events where parents can meet us and each other, discuss our program, and build community. You can find them on our events page– come and join us!

You can always write us an email or give us a call, too. We’d be very happy to chat. 

805 723 0530

staff@sbfree.org