EDUCATION New school on the Hill BY SARA DONNELLY

Georgia Williamson hopes to be the proud director of Portland’s newest little school this September. That is, if she can convince parents to send their kids. In April, Williamson registered the East School, a middle school serving grades five through eight, with the Maine Department of Education. The East School will be located on the first floor of a single-family home at 62 Monument Street on Munjoy Hill. Those of you with a sharp memory (honed in the classroom, no doubt) will recall that this building once housed the Hill School, which shut its doors in 2002. Williamson taught dance at the Hill School in its heyday and hopes to offer Portland-area kids a taste of that old-fashioned, one-room schoolhouse experience which she believes fosters deeper learning.

"I plan for [the students] to be learning all day long and still leave middle school with a sense of learning intact," says Williamson, a former interior designer who has no formal background in education. "I know in a classroom with 25 to 30 kids in it that a lot of what has to happen is informed by the number of kids in the class. A teacher can only accomplish so much [with that size class]."

Williamson has hired teacher Lee Chisholm, who worked for years at the private Merriconeag Waldorf School in Freeport and who taught Williamson’s eldest son, to lead the class of up to 16 students. Chisholm designed the curriculum, which includes traditional subjects like reading, writing, and arithmetic, along with courses on ancient and modern history, zoology, and human biology. In keeping with Chisholm’s experience at the Waldorf School, students will not work from textbooks but from information gathered at the library, and in the real world, and from work brought in by the teacher. There will be a rotating two-hour block of integrated learning in the morning that will focus on a particular topic like the ancient history of Asia or the geography if South America. In the afternoon, students will explore the traditional core subjects.

Williamson will direct the arts program, which she plans to structure around a series of visiting artists, many of whom are her friends and acquaintances.

Williamson has only just begun to advertise the East School and has already heard from a few interested parents. One student for sure is signed up — her 10-year-old son.

Tuition for the year is $7000. Williamson hopes to have at least 10 students signed on by July in order to open the school this fall. For more on the East School, contact Georgia Williamson at (207) 771-0200.