N.E.A.T. School at 46th & Irving (now Rivendell)

08/17/02 - posted by Will

Does anyone remember (dare I ask: did anyone attend??) the little private school that opened up in 70 or 71 at 46th and Irving? If memory serves, it used to be a poultry store or processing plant.

A bunch of parents somehow got together and purchased the site. They themselves then set about gutting the inside and converting it into a 1st thru 6th grade school that lasted until 1976. I remember in the very beginning months and months of playing evenings and weekends in this totally fun construction site while the parents toiled away.

I JUST remembered how this school began NOT at 46th and Irving, but prior to this in various parents' homes around the neighborhood.

Does anyone know how on earth these random parents - who, as far as I can recall, never knew each other prior to this endeavor - came together?

A few years after attending this strange school, I realized that my parents (average garden-variety Sunset lower-middle class, whitebread, mostly-conservative, mostly racist Democrat types) and many, probably most of the other parents came together in this actual social collective(!!) in direct response to the advent of bussing, and their overwhelming desire to keep their kids in a nearly all-white school.

The play yard of the school was an insanely dangerous uneven rock lot that stretched around the school from 46th around to Irving.

The teachers were mostly way-cool twenty-somethings who mostly must've been in college in the just-past 60s, beginning their teaching lives working for very little money in least prestigious of private schools teaching the kids of mostly-conservative parents.

The kids would often have recess on the sidewalk around the school.

Oooohhhh, lord. I could go on. Only entertaining myself, I fear.