Chicago Waldorf School

from the Loyola Phoenix11 April 2008

Waldorf School Loses Community Garden

by Nicole Charky

Loyola’s development may force school to relocate garden ‘down another street’

Sheree Moratto needs a space – green space – for Croc-wearing infants to 4-year-olds, along with elementary and high school students come fall. As a consequence of Loyola Station’s
“development phase two,” the Chicago Waldorf School, a private K-12 school located at 1300 W. Loyola Ave., will no longer have the Sophia garden to grow tomato plants, perennials and pigmented flowers.

“It’s really a shame to have this development happen, but at the same time, we knew from the beginning that this was on the horizon,” said Sheree Moratto, co-administrator at Chicago Waldorf School.

Every year around February, Moratto calls Loyola’s department of capital development to see if the site is going to be developed or if Waldorf can keep growing. Beginning in 1997, the university allowed Waldorf to use the garden space by a verbal agreement for three years. The garden site is across from the Loyola el stop on Loyola Avenue and is owned by the university.

“When we came to them and said we’d like to do this, they said,
‘Go ahead, with our blessings, but eventually we’re going to develop that site,’” Moratto said.

As development nears, the Waldorf School, one of the few urban schools of its kind in North America, will lose the garden site it has held for nearly 11 years. Moratto emphasized the importance of the garden in the school’s curriculum and parents’ responses to the loss of the garden.

“Our faculty knows about [the garden going away], and our older students, but we don’t like to over-intellectualize things with our younger children in the school,” Moratto said. “We’re not going to be talking [about it] to our younger children until probably next fall.”

“We have a lot of parents who are very upset and angry that it was going to be developed, but it had been such a unique kind of relationship that we had developed with Loyola,” Moratto said.

Loyola never requested that Waldorf pay for the land. “We’ve never paid anything to use the site other than what we’ve put into it with the plant materials and labor,” Moratto said.

The university has not offered them any alternative garden space, but Loyola is willing to work with Waldorf.

“We are looking at another space for a garden that would involve us purchasing a site, but I don’t know if we would be able to afford [it],” Moratto said.

Michael Brosko, associate director of strategic planning at Loyola’s department of capital development, said he is interested in helping Waldorf find a replacement garden.

“It’s been a nice neighborhood amenity,” Brosko said. “It was understood that it was an initiative that would be temporary. We engaged in the project, and I think it’s been a tremendous success. We’re always committed to working with the community.”

Loyola has set plans for the development of the site that Brosko hopes will benefit the campus, including the students, faculty, community and the Rogers Park neighborhood.

“The exact timing is not definite,” Brosko said. “We don’t have a month, a date that the construction will break ground at that particular site, but we know that in the next year to 18 months that it will be developed.”

Brosko described the new construction planned by Loyola.

“It will be residential units, [a] high-end apartment, with some parking components,” Brosko said. “The exact details are not worked out, but they will be market rate, rental apartments.”

Loyola senior Blake Anderson, the Student Environmental Alliance co-vice president, learned at the event Garden Cyclers on Friday that the garden is not having another growing season.

“Two individuals who have worked at the Sophia garden for years came and informed everyone that land is slated to be developed by Loyola,” Anderson said.

SEA would like to help the Waldorf School find another garden. Loyola will host another El Tracks meeting, where the discussion of construction plans and development will take place, with Wayne Magdziarz, vice president of strategic planning, later this month. SEA had an event scheduled but canceled it to encourage members to attend that meeting.

“We want to go there and speak out about our concern that we’re losing green and open space and we’re losing a valuable community asset, and if the university is determined to develop that plan then we would like to help them find alternate space.”

Anderson is worried about what may happen because the university owns the property.

“It’s likely that once they do finalize their plans they can start right away,” Anderson said. “There wouldn’t need to be any mandatory community input, which is one of my concerns. Overnight they may just begin to dig and they may start building. They could, in theory, rip out plants and start building tomorrow. It’s their land. I would hope that they wouldn’t do that and that’s part of why we’re encouraging students to attend this planning meeting so that we can ask them to reach out to the community, and the students … as well, and hopefully find a compromise around this.”

Moratto is confident about relocating the garden, committed to Rogers Park and willing to work in partnership with Loyola as both institutions continue development in the area.

“I think we could develop a good working relationship,” Moratto said. “I’m trying to keep our community from going sour because I feel like the gesture to let us use the site for so long has helped our community being here. It’s going to be a hard transition though, and it’s going to be hard to keep everybody positive about it.”

Moratto wants to work with Loyoala in the future and strives for a new garden space.

“Having the ability to observe the natural world unfold in a setting that’s not engineered by human beings is a critical component to Waldorf education,” Moratto said. “If we don’t have [the garden] down the street we’re going to find a way to have it down another street.”

The Sophia Garden: 11 April 2008

A Walk Down Memory Lane and a Look to the Future

by Co-Administrator, Sheree Moratto

It is winter, 1997. The Chicago Waldorf School has been at its new location at 1300 W. Loyola Ave. for two years after unexpectedly losing our lease at our previous location at St. Bonaventure’s. Our enrollment is about 200, we’re in the third year of offering our high school program and we’ve just gotten the incredibly huge auditorium (which we are sure we will never fill with people) up and running after two years of cleaning. A friend of the school, John Beaudry, a master horticulturist, was visiting the school and was leading GreenCorps Chicago at the time. As we were saying goodbye, he asked me if it was the Chicago Waldorf School’s intention to remain landlocked and without green space. I said no, and that we were happy to have the side yard and the parks. He asked me about the lot sitting empty just east of the school with nothing more than grass and a fence. I told him that Loyola University had just torn down one of the “problem” buildings they owned east of the school, a building where daily police visits and arrests were common.

John and I decided to see if we could convince Loyola to let us use the vacant lot for a community garden. We teamed with the Ignatian Services Food Pantry coordinator, Jackie Beale DelVecchio. Our plan was to transform the vacant lot into a community garden operated by the Chicago Waldorf School, designed and funded in Year One by the City of Chicago’s GreenCorps Program, with the mission of growing fresh vegetables for the clients of St. Ignatius’ Food Pantry. Amazingly, Loyola University agreed to our proposal and gave us permission to garden the site for three years at no charge. They told us at the beginning of the garden project that Loyola would not sell us the property and that when their development plans took shape, we would lose the use of the site.

Every student in the school participated in the garden installation that spring, from planting perennials, trees and shrubs to cutting sod, building raised beds and planting vegetables. Jackie and I decided to name the garden the Sophia Garden for Sophia, the divine feminine…the wisdom of the world. Two years later, Loyola demolished the building east of the Sophia Garden and invited us to expand the garden into the space as it currently exists. One special note of deep gratitude… goes to Patricia Holdrege. From the second year of Sophia Garden to today, Patricia has poured countless hours of love, sweat, muscle, vision and tears into the place. We and our neighbors are so thankful to her for bringing exuberance and life to the community through the garden. Thank you, Patricia.

When our three year arrangement ended, CWS and Loyola agreed that we would check in annually, each February, to see if Loyola’s expansion plans would affect the next growing season. Each year I called Loyola’s capital development office and each year, we got the go ahead for another year of gardening. We have never paid a penny to Loyola for the use of the property.

This year, parents Mike Dillon, Joe Ferguson and I met with Loyola in October and were informed that the site was going to be developed soon. In my annual February check in, I was informed that the plan for a mixed use residential/retail building calls for groundbreaking in November 2008. We have one more growing season to revel in the unlikely gift of land for a garden that has brought us a place to watch the natural world unfold a true experience the cycle of the year. Over these 11 years, we’ve carved stones for the garden, painted panels to adorn the garden, planted untold numbers of plants there, given a home to the homeless, watched the trees grow, harvested vegetables to give to our neighbors, played and some of us have even found a little hill to roll down. This place has been a wonderful gift and I thank Loyola University for their generous gift to our school and to the community.

It is a wonderful place that is hard to imagine losing and I can understand why there are questions about the Sophia Garden and Loyola’s expansion plans. Here are some that I have heard…

• Have we made our case for why this space is so important to CWS? We have always been open with Loyola about how important this place is to us and we have done so every year since 1997. We have also given Loyola our deep thanks and appreciation for the use of the site free of charge.

• Did we try to buy the property? Yes, we offered many times to purchase the site, but Loyola has had other plans since 1997. We knew from the beginning that we could use it until their development plans were complete. They have never been interested in or willing to sell us the property.

• Did we fight hard enough to keep Sophia Garden? To me, it isn’t a question of a fight. When we first began the garden back in 1997, the idea that CWS would be in this location for more than six years seemed highly unlikely. The school’s leadership had long planned on finding a permanent home. This location was seen as a short stop on the journey to a permanent campus elsewhere. The opportunity to develop a garden even in the short term was such a wonderful one, we couldn’t pass it up.

Of course, things changed in 2005 when the Board of Trustees and College of Teachers decided to develop a permanent campus around the 1300 W. Loyola main building. We purchased the Science Center Building in 2006 (our first ever real estate purchase), negotiated an 11 year lease on the main building, continued the lease on the storefronts across the street from the main building and added the Early Childhood 5 classroom next to New Leaf. We began relationships with St. Ignatius, Loyola, the neighbors and aldermen that were about being good neighbors for a little while. Now, we find that we need to deepen these relationships as companions in guiding the future of our neighborhood together.

So what do we do about the Sophia Garden? Give up? Get mad at each other or at Loyola for not selling to us what was never intended? Personally, I think it’s time for us to take the next step on that long journey toward developing our permanent home. The Board and College are committed to this neighborhood. There is a vision of Sophia Garden moving to a new site, one that we would purchase and that would be our own. It would be a short walk from our main building and in the middle of the garden would be a new Early Childhood Center. We are looking at property at 1240 W. Pratt and are meeting with Alderman Moore to explore the possibility of developing this site. Go take a look at it – can you imagine it? It would take your support and vision to make this a reality, but I can see it in my heart, just like I saw Sophia Garden in a vacant lot.