If you attended July Quarterly Meeting last year (2012) or the year before, you’ve seen this lovely preschool. Now located in what was the family home on the former Woodward Farm (Chadds Ford), Fairville Friends School had much more modest beginnings. It was started in 1973 by Barbara DesJardins (Bradford MM, Concord QM),in the young Quaker teacher’s living room. “I took a table, and cut the legs off shorter so the kids could reach it,” Barbara has said of those earliest years. Anything that needed to be done—around the house or in the yard—became a “field trip” of sorts for the handful of children she taught. That can-do spirit, combined with a real understanding of children and how to nurture their Light-within led to larger enrollments, and the school moved along Kennett Pike several times before acquiring the farmhouse from the Woodward family (Kennett MM) in 1988. Now, 40 years later, Fairville Friends School is under the care of Kennett Monthly Meeting, has 6 classrooms, 4 play yards (plus two sheep and a rabbit!), and serves children from ages 2 through kindergarten. Through it all they have held Quaker values as central to their mission, and the daily life of the school. To see what that looks like, take a peek at the video on their homepage, celebrating “40 Years of Friendship at Fairville Friends”. As the words appear around the images, see if you can spot all 40, and how they relate to our testimonies.
Link: http://www.fairvillefriends.org/.
-Sarah Kastriner is Clerk of Fairville Friends Board of Trustees
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