When a student crosses paths with a great teacher, the influence can reverberate well beyond the last day of school. Teachers stand at the threshold to the world; they have the power to take down or build up, to extinguish confidence or plant hope.
Two such teachers, Anita Collison and Katherine Sanford, both mainstays of the Lagunitas School District, are retiring at the end of the year after impactful tenures. Both women live in the San Geronimo Valley, sent their own children through the district and are known for teaching students to see their community not as something fixed around them, but as something they are capable of shaping.
Ms. Collison, a third- and fourth-grade teacher who has worked for the district for 35 years, began her career as a bus driver shortly after moving to the valley as a young mother. She later worked as a part-time art teacher and classroom aide before joining the staff of the school’s Open Classroom program in the mid-2000s.
“Anita is an institution and an icon at Lagunitas Community School,” said Kathleen Graham, the district’s superintendent. “She embodies the heart and philosophy of what the school is.”
Ms. Graham said Ms. Collison’s teaching reflects a belief that learning is inseparable from moral and social development. “She feels that the whole child has to be taught—that it is more than just academics,” she said. “Learning to be a good citizen is part of that.”
The Open Classroom grew out of the open education movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which sought to loosen the grip of rigid curricula, standardized tests and grade-level separation. Some open schools did away with walls altogether and gave children the freedom to shape what and how they learned.
Lagunitas’s Open Classroom program began amid that ferment, in 1971. Students from kindergarten through sixth grade shared a contiguous space, where learning was meant to be spontaneous, personalized and child-driven. The program drew on the ideas of Jean Piaget, the psychologist whose work helped shape modern theories of cognitive development; John Holt, the school reformer whose writing became foundational to the homeschooling movement; and the Summerhill School model, rooted in the belief that a school should fit the child, rather than the other way around.
In 2023, the district jettisoned the Open Classroom as a standalone program and merged it with an existing Montessori program. But for many in Lagunitas, Ms. Collison remained a steadfast embodiment of the Open philosophy, carrying its old spirit into a new era.
“Anita may very well be the last of the old guard that made that school such a unique place,” said Richard Sloan, a onetime board member who was instrumental in the creation of the Open Classroom.
Ms. Collison, 61, has a boyish tuft of brown hair and, last week, stood in her classroom wearing a black T-shirt bearing an outline of North America overlaid with the words “Native Land.” Her hexagonal room is covered with student-drawn maps, biology classification charts and tanks housing various reptiles, including Spotty, a 23-year-old crested gecko, and Annie, a 30-year-old turtle. Beside the classroom building, she has long kept a small barnyard with rabbits and hens.
Ms. Collison has a rare knack for giving children autonomy without letting the room devolve into a free-for-all. “She can take all the energy and direct it into really fun and amazingly creative things that help the students learn in a self-directed way and in an experiential way,” said Breeze Kinsey, who attended the school and now has a son in Ms. Collison’s class.
Often the students lead the course of study. And just as often, the lesson spills into to the world beyond the classroom.
For much of her career, Ms. Collison served as union president or negotiator, and civic engagement has always been central to her teaching. Over the years, her students have staged protests against wars and gun violence and marched for climate justice, International Women’s Day and Pride Month.
“I’ve always been involved in grassroots politics—in San Francisco in the ’80s, I went to protests every week,” she said. “I’m as honest with the kids as I can be about life, even on a personal level, about who I am and what I believe in. You have to be careful, though, as a teacher, not to push your values or your belief system onto students, but to allow them to have their own experiences and develop their own beliefs, to encourage them to decide for themselves who they are and what they believe in.”
In the nine years Ms. Sanford has worked for the district, she has left an equally outsized imprint, carrying that same belief in student agency into the middle school years. In her eighth-grade social studies class, her Change Project—a yearlong endeavor in which students identify a problem in their community and create a plan to make a measurable difference—has become a centerpiece of the curriculum. So has the trip to Alabama, where students visit the landmarks of the civil rights movement, from Selma to Montgomery. (Ms. Sanford and the district are working to ensure that both traditions continue after she leaves.)
“Katherine is one of the most unique, dynamic, intelligent and inspiring teachers that I’ve ever come across in my 35 years in education,” Ms. Graham said. “The civil rights trip to Alabama is life-changing for students. They end up better informed, more sympathetic, more socially responsible and more civic-minded individuals because of going on that trip.”
Ms. Sanford’s artistry is on display as she nimbly moves about the room, almost imperceptibly steering her students toward deeper thought. Each day begins with “Today in History.” Last Monday, the subject was Columbine.
Students discussed gun violence and the way the world has changed in the nearly three decades since two young men ushered in the era of high-casualty shootings with their massacre at Columbine High School. The students, unsurprisingly, had many questions about an event that has profoundly shaped what it means to come of age in the American education system.
“Were the shooters bullied?” one seventh grader asked.
“I think they were kind of on the outside a little bit,” Ms. Sanford replied. “But there are thousands of kids, millions of kids, who aren’t in the cool crowd in high school and don’t necessarily act it out that way, right?”
At 50, Ms. Sanford has the unmistakable air of a cool teacher. She drives a black pickup, has a smattering of tattoos and wears miniskirts with black knee-high Converse. She has clout with her students, who see her as a devoted advocate and a formidable authority.
“I feel like you get to know her on a deeper level than the other teachers—she’s more than a teacher,” said Ocean Ely, an eighth grader in her class. “We know about her life, about her kids, and she knows about what’s going on in our lives. She has a way with students where she makes them feel comfortable and a little scared of her at the same time.”
Ms. Sanford is finely attuned to her students’ needs. She knows who should be reminded to breathe during an exam, who is having trouble at home, who cannot sit still, who learns best from a desk and who learns best from the floor.
Students are known to text her at all hours of the day or even show up on her porch after a fight with their parents. “I think that’s part of the beautiful thing about living in the community where you teach,” she said. “It’s truly so amazing—that opportunity to really get to know your students as people, as human beings, and to watch them grow up at this incredibly strange stage of their lives.”
Ms. Sanford became a teacher in the shadow of the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind Act, passed in 2001, which yoked schools’ survival to test scores. It forced teachers to teach to the test, in effect giving up curriculum for test preparation. The climate demoralized her. After a few years, she left the profession to teach yoga and raise her three young children.
Shortly after moving from the East Coast to Woodacre in 2014, she began substitute teaching at Lagunitas, first filling in for a third- and fourth-grade teacher on maternity leave before stepping into her role in the middle school.
Middle school quickly became her favorite age group, though when she tells people she works with students that age, “they always look completely horrified, as if I’ve told them I’m a zookeeper for venomous snakes or something,” she said. “But to me, it’s the perfect age because I get to watch each kid stepping into themselves and start to recognize that they have agency and that they are powerful in their own right.”
Her eighth graders spend the year studying American history, beginning with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights before moving into Reconstruction and the long, violent decades that preceded the civil rights movement. She pushes her students to form opinions and defend them, and to understand that history is shaped by people who “identify a problem and then make their way to a solution.”
“The most important thing that I want them to take away is this idea that democracy is based on ordinary people doing extraordinary things,” she said. It is a notion that binds the two teachers. If Ms. Collison sows the seeds of civic participation, helping younger students begin to see themselves as actors in the world, Ms. Sanford cultivates those instincts in her classroom.
“These are teachers who, when there is a child that’s struggling, can always see their potential for growth,” said Jenelle Ferhart, the district principal. “What we know about kids is that if they don’t feel safe at school, if they don’t feel a sense of belonging, they really can’t learn. I think a tribute to both teachers is that they’ve left an indelible imprint on the school and their students by creating an environment where children can really learn.”