13/12/2022
Head Teacher Linda Raubenheimer pens a beautiful farewell.
On the 2nd December 2022, our parent, teacher and children community gathered for the final Advent festival at our school in Country Lane estate.
It was an evening where we could celebrate twenty-five wonderful years of happiness and growth with a huge amount of gratitude and thankfulness to particular sets of people.
Firstly, we give thanks to our gracious landlord, Felix Meyburgh. Truly, the school would not have survived these past two and a half decades without his benevolence, patience and steadfast support. Thank you Felix and Cornelia. We are ever in your debt.
Then, we also look to the parents of the school with gratitude and thankfulness for their faithful support over these many years. However, it is not just the current parents, but more especially, those past parents who helped create and layer the history of the school. When clearing out storerooms, as we did these past few months, one is bound to uncover little hidden treasures, and most recently, Teacher Natalie found an old printed brochure detailing the history of the school. On reading it one realises that it is the parents, and not the teachers, who bring a school to life. Our school was founded when a woman named Lesley Smith was searching for a suitable school for her children and finding no worthy such establishment, decided to start a Waldorf school. She advertised for parents and teachers and Michelle Beneke responded and thus the little school which they named the Village Waldorf School was founded here at Country Lane in 1997 with Michelle, Lesley, Simone, Dawn and Theodore Thorne and Natalie Georgiou. To these strong and pioneering hearts we give thanks.
Now, as all the children in the school know, whenever there is a leave-taking we sing a song “The river is flowing, growing and growing..… down to the sea.”. Our school is a river carrying us like the mother down to the sea. And it is this handful of people who opened up the trickle of water from deep within the earth which became the stream which grew into the river which is our school.
The school grew from 1997 onwards and by 2003 there was a total of 68 children. Then the little river encountered a series of rapids which the school struggled to navigate and suddenly its foreclosure seemed imminent. But, again, it was a core group of parents who stood steadfast and strong. Pete Savage, Patricia van Zyl and a couple of other warrior parents, Viking parents, refused against all odds to let the school die. True grit and dogged faith opened up a new path for the waters of the school to follow, and slowly but surely the pupil numbers grew again. Of course, there have been a number of other times when bridges needed to be built over troubled waters, and again, the school prevailed. But it is to this core group of Viking hearts that we also give our thanks.
With all these thanks given, we look to the children, realizing that ultimately it is the children who bring the essence of joy to a school, and so it is the children whom we thank with our hearts for their spontaneous and joyful chatter, their songs and their laughter.
Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher, famously said that no man enters the same river twice and no man who enters is the same man. This little school, the Village Waldorf School, is the river that flows, the river that grows, and soon the ever changing and ever new waters of our little school will run down from this hill and up the next to find its next beautiful home in Sterkfontein Road in 2023.
