40 Years of Success

In 1971, a group of parents from a parent-participation preschool banded together to start an innovative new school for the next step in their preschooler’s education. Christa McAuliffe School is the product of their efforts, formed out of the belief that parents should be a fundamental part in their children’s education.

On Friday, students, teachers and parents were invited to an open house to celebrate the 40-year anniversary of the Christa McAuliffe School, where they were treated to photos and news articles collected from the beginning.

The school was named after Christa McAuliffe in the late '80s in honor of the teacher who died in the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. 

One parent whose children attended the school in the 1990s was able to collect every article written about the school from its inception in 1971 up to 1995, when there was a 25-year reunion. Those articles were displayed at the open house.

“The families now, today, probably don’t have any sense, or not very much sense, of all the history of the program and how it started out as a really small school,” said Gail Marzolf, a parent and a member of the Parent Faculty Group.

The program started as a single kindergarten class and evolved to include all grades up to eight. “It was such a different curriculum than what was going on in traditional Cupertino schools, they had to fight kind of hard to keep the program going and to watch it grow,” Marzolf said.

Students at the school are taught through "instructivism," a hands-on way of education that invites parent involvement and teaches students critical-thinking skills, thinking outside the box and creativity.

“Kids are not taught algorithms to do math,” said Marzolf. “They are presented with strategies, they come up with their own strategies for solving math problems (and) they share strategies with each other.”

Parents invest a couple hours each week at the school. “If they have a special talent, like jewelry making or ceramics, then they will be able to share that with the children, or they aid in math or they aid in science,” said Marzolf. Because she enjoys exercise, Marzolf gave fourth-graders a weekly elective that presented different forms of cardiovascular exercise.

In addition to the open house, the school also had a picnic at Blackberry Farm in Cupertino with about 900 attendees. “It really is a place where you start to feel like family,” said Marzolf. “You share so many interactions together through the years that your children attend school, that the bonds are very strong and life lasting.”

Marzolf acknowledged the challenges with finding parents and students from nearly 40 years ago.

“I’ve just really been focused on trying to reach out to our alumni community, going all the way back to 1971,” Marzolf said.  “And, of course, there was no email back then, so looking at old rosters and sending out postcards to addresses, that was my goal, to let everyone who’s been involved with the school for the past 40 years, to somehow contact them so if they wanted to come participate in the picnic, they could.”