Today we’d like to introduce you to Dagmar Truckses.
So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
In the late 1990s I had finished my Ph.D. in Biochemistry and was working towards a career as a biomedical scientist. Around that time I also got married to my husband, Nat, who was working towards a career as a geologist. He ended up getting a job offer at ExxonMobil in Houston, TX, that we decided to accept. So, we moved from Northern California to Houston and I started working with a professor in the Biochemistry Department at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. I ended up getting pregnant and three years later, after I gave Birth to our second child, I made the decision to stop working. I had never been sure I wanted children and now that I had them I needed more time to figure out how to be the mother I wanted to be. At the same time I was going through a professional crisis: I was disillusioned with the biomedical research world, how research was justified and funded.
My sister had come to visit to help me with the Birth of our first Baby in 2003. She introduced me to Waldorf education, an approach to education with a 100-year track record that originated in Germany, but spread all over the world. In 2003 Houston was one of the only big cities in the US without a Waldorf School, but we discovered that there was an initiative called Shining Star School. Our first daughter started attending Shining Star Kindergarten at the age of three and I joined the board of directors in the hopes of helping Shining Star School to grow and flourish. However, although I did a lot of work for Shining Star School, growing and developing the school did not work out for various reasons. Another Waldorf School initiative started in North of Houston and in late 2009 momentum started building for starting another Waldorf School initiative in Central Houston. In October 2010 Bayou Village School opened its doors as an independent non-profit 501(c)(3) with me as its president.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
There have been several challenges along the way. One of them has to do with facilities.
Finding a facility that fulfills all the requirements for licensing to operate as a school, has room for expansion, but nevertheless is not too expensive is a challenge.
Another big challenge is to get quality and trained teachers. Recruiting trained Waldorf teachers has proven to be very difficult as there is a shortage of Waldorf teachers all over the US. Our main strategy has become to hire quality local teachers and to organize Waldorf training workshops at the school. Besides that we support teachers financially to pursue a part-time Waldorf teacher training program at one of the Waldorf teacher training institutions across the country. Having fully trained lead teachers is one of the requirements of Waldorf School accreditation.
A third challenge is to grow and develop the volunteer board of directors of the school. Ideally you want a board that consists of individuals with a variety of backgrounds and expertise. We’ve had some wonderful board members over the years, but most of them stay on the board only for a year or two. Thus, most years we look for new board members who we then have to bring up to speed about what is going on and how our non-profit school functions.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
Bayou Village School initially opened with a small mixed-age Kindergarten for 3-6 year olds. Since then the school has grown significantly: For the 2017-18 school year we will have classrooms for toddlers through third grade with approximately 110 children enrolled. The school is a developing member of the Waldorf Early Childhood Association of North America (WECAN) and is working towards applying for accreditation with the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America. Our plan is to grow the grades program up to 8th grade and eventually add a high school.
As our school slogan says we strive to ‘awaken the mind, enliven the heart and engage the hands’. Music, dance and theater, writing, literature, legends and myths, foreign languages and even math and science are not simply subjects to be learned about and tested. They are experienced. The aim is that through these experiences, our students cultivate their intellectual, emotional, physical and spiritual capacities and thus become individuals who find their path in life with purpose.
This approach to education generates an inner enthusiasm for learning, allowing motivation to arise from within instead of through rewards, punishment and/or testing.
We also strive to develop in our students a strong connection with nature. This means that the children go outside rain or shine. Every child has a pair of rubber boots and a rain jacket at school. The Waldorf curriculum includes gardening and house/shelter building in third grade, but all our grades classes as well as most of our early childhood classrooms are doing some gardening and we are working on further developing our outdoors curriculum.
Some of the things Bayou Village School is known for are the following:
– beautiful classrooms with painted walls in soft colors
– nurturing teachers
– children spending a lot of time outdoors
– families being asked to limit children’s screen time (which has many benefits)
– Winter Faire, a seasonal festival open to the public
– starting sitting-down-at-a-desk academics (reading, writing, math) only in 1st grade
– domestic activities like soup making and bread baking
– every child learns to knit, crochet and sew
– part-time enrollment options in early childhood classrooms
We are very proud of our staff, who are professionals who care about the children and who are passionate about the school’s mission. We are also thrilled and proud that in the past few years we were able to reach several fundraising goals for the school. In 2015 we raised the money to purchase the empty lot behind the school, allowing us to expand the outdoor space. In 2016 we secured a matching grant from Avenue CDC in collaboration with LISC to improve the façade of our building so that it does not look like a warehouse anymore. And earlier this year we successfully raised money to support the training for our teachers.
Pricing:
- $10,440/school year for full-time enrollment of toddlers
- $9,270/school year for full time enrollment of 2- 3.5 year olds
- $8,100/school year for full time enrollment of 3.5 – 6 year olds
- $8,820/school year for first and second grade
- $9,270/school year for third grade
Contact Info:
- Address: 3701 Hardy Street,
Houston, TX 77009 - Website: www.bayouvillageschool.org
- Phone: 713-864-2452
- Email: enroll@bayouvillageschool.org
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