SAR Built a School Without Walls. A Banister Race Found One.

The school was formed in 1969 by a merger, and during the merger talks its founders learned about the Open Education movement. Classes began in the mansion and carriage house of the conductor Arturo Toscanini's former estate, with recess on the field, while a Texas architecture firm, after interviewing principals, teachers and students, designed the new building. It followed the hillside instead of flattening it.

A parent of alumni, writing for the school's 50th anniversary, put the result best: doctorates have been written on the philosophy of the open classroom, but SAR's students understand walls, and the lack of them, perfectly well, in ways that would delight the founders, whom one child listed as "Rabbi Akiba, Rabbi Salanter and Rabbi Riverdale."

Rabbi Riverdale. A child looked at three merged school names and produced a founder. My children would have listed ours as Mom, Dad and the dog, and not in that order.

The night before the building's dedication in 1974, four founders went over for last-minute details and found the contractor had left it full of builder's dust. They went home, came back with brooms and cleaning supplies, and swept the dedication hall and entrance until close to morning, then returned a few hours later for the ceremony and never mentioned it.

That is every school founder I have ever met, and every PTA parent. You start with a philosophy of education. You end, at 3 a.m., holding a broom.

Then came the students and the stairs. One alumna remembers Friday dismissal as all the grades converging "in a mayhem of kids and backpacks." Another describes the stairs as "a boisterous game of chutes and ladders played out daily in real life."

And a third, who transferred in fifth grade, remembers practicing stair-sliding for a year to catch up. In sixth grade her class held a competition: who could slide down the lower sixth-grade banister fastest. One boy slid so fast he accidentally kicked a huge hole in the wall. A teacher banned the class from sliding for the rest of the year, and it took a few weeks to cover the hole, which, she noted, reminded everyone of the fun a little longer.

A school without walls, and a sixth grader at full speed found one. I once found the only lamp in a hotel room at full speed. Nobody covered the hole. My wife still mentions it.