Our History
“Four Rivers really started in C20,” says Susan Durkee, who co-founded the school with Ed Blatchford in 2003.
C20 was the detention room in Susan’s large, impersonal high school, where everyone convicted of any wrongdoing went for an hour after school to contemplate their misdeeds.
“I sat in C20, angry and alienated, and thought about how school could be different.”
Ed and Susan
Four Rivers Charter Public School was founded by two people who each came to the endeavor from vastly different backgrounds. Ed, a lifelong educator, prioritized character development as the paramount goal of schooling and centered his life’s work around this focus. With degrees from Yale and then Columbia, he taught in Beirut, Alabama, New York, and throughout New England before moving into administration. After years as a private school Headmaster in Connecticut, he started a small private school in Massachusetts, which was unable to sustain funding after its initial years. Facing this disappointment, he considered his next steps. Still compelled by the primacy of character education, in search of a vehicle for his dreams, he began to research the Massachusetts charter school process.
By contrast, Susan Durkee moved in and out of the education field alongside multiple other careers. She recognized the problematic end product of traditional schools: passive students unable to fully engage with the process of learning. Inspired by the desire to make education meaningful, she brainstormed structures and systems for a new type of school: compelling curriculum driven by community need; authentic products for authentic audiences; a grading system based in content and skills. Then, suddenly, painful loss upended her life, leaving her unmoored and uncertain about her future. From that period of despair, she says, “I decided to throw myself a life-line, one that would require optimism, courage and resilience. Something that would demand all of me.” She chose to start a school.
Having heard about “a guy up in Greenfield” who was also trying to start a charter school, Susan reached out and made contact with Ed. They agreed to meet. “We start to talk, and the chemistry was immediate,” Susan recalls.
“Ed and I are so unalike, but he rolled with my rough edges and I rolled with his refinement.
We were both on the same page.”
Making Headway
In the process of getting their school started, Susan and Ed researched possible partnerships with existing organizations. Independently, they each discovered ELOB: Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound, the group that would later become EL Education. Susan and Ed affiliated with ELOB, and in collaboration with early Expeditionary Learning superstars like Scott Hartl, Ron Berger, and Steven Levy, Four Rivers began to take shape.
Susan and Ed wrote the 50 page charter application and presented it to the Department of Education. She remembers being so excited during the presentation, she had to stand up and gesticulate, compelled and energized by their plans. Their charter was approved. In June of 2002, they received the charter startup grant, and the work really began.
They attended every workshop they could from the Department of Education and the Charter School office. They hung up flyers, set up info meetings, drove everywhere with a box of Expeditionary Learning student work and a roll of blueprints; they collected people to become the Founding Board. They networked: do you know anyone who has land where we can build our school?
Visioning
Siting proved challenging as each new possibility fell through. Despairing of finding a location, the Founding Board held a visioning meeting, where they each imagined the perfect place to build their school. When they shared out, they realized they had all been picturing the Myers Farm. A few days later, Susan received a call: the Myers family had heard they were looking for land to build a school, and would they like to meet?
The next months were a whirlwind of construction and hiring. They broke ground on the building that would become the middle school. They interviewed teachers and staff, and the founding faculty list grew from just Ed and Susan to include Harlan Smith, Bill Fogel, Anne Haxo, Leif Riddington, Deirdre Scott, Matt Leaf, and Mandy Locke.
But of course, it wasn’t a school without students. 64 brave families signed on for year one when Four Rivers was just Susan, Ed, and blueprints. “I interviewed some of them years later,” Susan remembers.
“I asked them, ‘Why did you do it? Why did you come on board?’
And they said, ‘You guys were amazing. You told the best story.
We had such faith in you.’”
The Founders
School began in August 2003. They received the certificate of occupancy for their building on opening day, just in time. The students helped move in: they built benches and bookshelves, and they staked a claim on the space.
“The students didn’t call it ‘the school’ or ‘your school.’
They called it ‘our school.’ Four Rivers was theirs.
Susan pushes back when she and Ed are called the founders of Four Rivers. “There were dozens of founders,” she corrects. “Me and Ed, 7 faculty and staff, 64 kids. Ed and I set the course, but then you had to have people work with it.”
Four Rivers Charter Public School has grown and changed since Susan and Ed first envisioned it all those years ago, but it would not exist today without their courage to take a huge risk in the face of the unknown.
“It’s important for kids to know that we didn’t start the school from a place of obvious and enormous strength,” Susan says. “We were uncertain. But when we came together, we wanted to delve into what was possible and not retreat from lack of certainty. We were looking for the next most positive, expansive meaningful thing.”
“We were looking for what was possible. The school was born from that.”
Thanks to Susan Durkee for giving her time so generously for this interview, just as she has given so generously in everything to do with this school.
Ed Blatchford passed away in April 2020. His legacy lives on in Four Rivers itself as well as in the hearts and minds of the countless students and teachers whose lives he changed for the better.
Artifacts
