Jazz T-Bone: The homepage for Joe Jackson

Joe's Speech at the Fairhaven School 10th Anniversary Celebration

May 17, 2008

There are a number of events and activities that occurred during the heady days when we were founding Fairhaven School and planning for the school’s opening. I thought I would relate some of them here for you today, however these are merely a few of the thousands of vignettes that form the history and culture of what has formed here and grown into such a rich and vibrant community.

In 1999, shortly after opening, the school learned that the lot next door was for sale. We really did not want for someone else to buy the land and clear it and build a house or another business next door, so FSI decided that we should purchase it. And soon thereafter was created the myth of the fairy tree. The fairy tree legend was born when some of the younger female school members had been looking at fairies in books and then one of them reported to all the others that she actually saw a fairy in the big tree on the property next door. And for a while a flock of young girls would conduct a daily pilgrimage to our lot next door to sit by the tree looking for fairies. The legend grew and School Meeting voted to include an area around the tree to be mowed, and this continues even today.

People sometimes forget how unstable the school felt in its first year or two. Early on in Fairhaven’s existence, many of the students coming in were folks that had been expelled from their previous schools for various nefarious reasons, and in some cases Fairhaven became the last resort for a few students that had a somewhat violent, scary streak.

I remember in the latter part of Fairhaven’s first year of operation, shortly after Columbine shooting, one of these students threatened to bring a gun to school. As a result the student was barred from attending, and various parents took turns as lookout, ready to call the police at any sign of him arriving at the school. Some scary times indeed.

There were a number of fundraisers, I know later on in the school’s operation we had a number of auction/gala events for the school. One of the more notorious auction items was the slot machine. It was a real old-style Vegas slot machine – I don’t remember who originally donated it but it was auctioned one year to a family who used it for a year and then turned around and auctioned it again at the auction the following year. Our family was the buyer that second year, we proceeded to use it for a year or two and then auction it off to another family. I’m not sure where the slot machine is now but it certainly did its job of raising funds for the school, several times over.

As we were preparing for the push to build the school we engaged in some pretty desperate activities in order to raise the money and stimulate the energy needed to open. One of the things we did was get involved in building deconstruction to salvage materials to be used in the construction of the school and to recruit civic-minded volunteers who might help in the school’s construction.

There was a non-profit organization that specialized in home deconstruction, which is a process wherein home and building owners would contact the group, and they would go to the site, take apart the building and salvage whatever materials they deemed usable for Habitat for Humanity projects and the projects of other non profits such as Fairhaven. I remember being involved with at least four deconstruction projects. We came up with quite a lot of materials in these projects – many of them were used in the school, but many of them that we thought would somehow be useful at the time turned out to be unusable and in some cases quite ridiculous in retrospect.

In fact, here is a complete list of the materials we salvaged (*hold up list). I won’t go through all of these, but here are some highlights (*read highlights).

The really funny thing is that this list was compiled and carefully priced out so to present with our business plan to banks to convince them that we had all of these really valuable materials already in hand, and that the fair market value of the material should be considered equity against any loan we got. When in reality it was largely one big pile of junk. The ironic thing is that it worked and we got the loan.

One of our deconstruction projects turned out to be a home belonging to Juwan Howard, who was then a basketball star for the Washington Bullets. The house had burned and there wasn’t a lot to be salvaged as there was a good deal of smoke damage. But we got this idea that we would send Juwan Howard a letter saying basically, “we have this great school we’re trying to build, thanks for letting us salvage materials from your house, how about giving us a donation?” Needless to say we didn’t get a reply.

Most of these endeavors engendered a great deal of blood, sweat and tears, and blood and sweat were the main ingredients of a lot of these salvage projects. Linda, could you tell them about our courtroom chair salvage project?

There was quite a variety and quite a degree of diversity in the makeup of the early founders group and boards of directors. We had Ray Hartjen, who contacted Romey after learning about the school – Ray had a non-profit educational research organization, and he became intensely interested in the school. He ended up retiring during the founding process, donated much of the materials from his non profit to the school, and became centrally involved with the founding process. He was an amateur videographer and took a lot of footage at the school. He ended up moving to Long Island right before construction, but he came down and lived in our house during the summer of 98 and dedicated his whole summer to working on the building. Ray couldn’t be here today, but his efforts were certainly instrumental.

Peter Kellogg Smith was another person on the board early on. Peter was an original founder of what ended up becoming the Key School in Annapolis. I remember Peter saying that Key school had originally been a lot like Fairhaven early in its existence, and lamented that it had changed – he therefore chose to direct his energies to the Fairhaven project.

There was a sad aspect to many of these founders, similar to the plight of the samurai in Akira Kurosawa’s film “The Seven Samurai.” In the film, the samurai take pity on the poor villagers who are regularly attacked by bandits, but the samurai risk (and in some cases lose) their lives to save the village only to find that in the end they are on the outside looking in. The day Fairhaven School opened, some of our founders were disheartened when the school opened and all the staff and students piled in the school to begin their experiences, while these volunteers were left outside looking in.

There were a number of interesting and often hilarious classes early on in the school’s history. One was an Esperanto class – for those of you not familiar with Esperanto, it is the most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language in the world, and is an exceedingly obscure subject to study. There was a religious inquiry class, featuring an atheist lecturer, a wiccan lecturer, and a Roman Catholic Priest. There was one staged nature class, wherein Mark McCaig took a group of students to the lot next door and had them intently examine the flora on the ground while I took pictures to be presented to the PG County Planning Board in a hearing to try to establish that Fairhaven school was indeed using the lot for its charitable purpose and therefore should not pay property tax. It should be noted that we are still paying property tax on that lot. Linda, can you tell them about the “cooking with boys class?”

And last but not least, we knew the school was rolling when 6-year-old Anna Droege agreed to teach 6yo Josette Jackson the “everything Class – from A to Z” wherein Anna would teach Josette about everything. The “Everything Class” I feel was a lovely snapshot of what occurs here at the school, though it was a short-lived class – they only got to letter “B.” And they skipped letter “A.” Josette tells me that Anna taught her all about “Big Bang” and “Baby Boomers.

Back To Rants