Preserving the Past and Shaping the Future

by Monte McClain

If you have ever driven by Maxwell Park, on Allendale Avenue just off High Street, you may have seen groups of children and adults playing in the yard of an old house. Gail Murphy is the director of Peter Pan Cooperative Preschool, located in that house. Started in 1947 by Mills University women in Maxwell Park, the co-op continues with the original vision of offering community, affordability, and a nursery school experience for children in Oakland. Today it's a vibrant community of 30 families, all of whom are required to work specific jobs to keep the co-op going, ranging from teaching one day a week, doing weekly maintenance jobs, raising funds, and developing work projects and monthly social events for both adults and children.

Throughout the past 60 years the school has been in different settings and locations throughout the neighborhoods from Fruitvale Avenue to Seminary Avenue and from Foothill Boulevard to the Warren Freeway. The Co-op school last moved in 1982 from Miracles of Faith Church (on Virginia) to its present location in the old house at 4618 Allendale Ave. Director since 1984, Murphy has been involved there since coming as a parent in 1979 looking for a preschool experience and community. She has a long history in these neighborhoods, dating even farther back than her childhood memories of going for penny candy at John's Sweet Shop in the Laurel (now Phnom Penh). All four of her grandparents lived in the Laurel, where her parents both attended school at Laurel Elementary, Bret Harte and Fremont. She has worked with diverse District Four families over the past 25 years and has lived in neighborhoods from the Laurel to Maxwell Park to Millsmont to Redwood Heights.

When asked how she has seen our neighborhoods change recently, she names many factors: a significant loss of the African-American middle-class population in Maxwell Park, a gentrifying effect as older residents are replaced by younger families, and the arrival of many couples looking for affordable housing. The new residents are a catalyst for ongoing transformation. Their expectations of change, activist perspective, willingness to work hard and their access to communication and communal organizations, such as the many Community Yahoo! groups including MPNC, all inspire change. Murphy sees that many of these families are struggling as they aim to balance work and parenting, and find decent educational opportunities for their children in an extremely expensive environment.'

Referring to our hurried balancing act of urban life, Murphy suggests that a Co-op Community can provide part of the support families are looking for. What was historically provided through church communities and the expansive Parks & Recreation programs in local public schools is either no longer provided or sought. "Our neighborhood is changing. But children aren't. Children need a heavy concentration of adults around them to support and raise them up teaching them interdependence and relationships." Co-ops can provide urban families with an extended family a community context that is a haven, to provide personal order and structure, a communal safety net for children, essentially an urban village to help parents raise their children in the middle of the urban jungle.'

The curriculum at Peter Pan is play based: the program seeks to provide children with "time and opportunities for self-directed play, development of personal power through social settings and contact with the natural world." Play-based schooling, which has been much in the news of late, aims primarily to foster creativity and ingenuity. It's about balance and social development more so than about academic acquisition

The co-op context is also instrumental in supporting families through providing parenting skills and preparing parents for becoming future participants in local schools as helpers in the classroom, fundraisers and PTA Board members. Like many of the new residents in our part of Oakland, Gail believes that Peter Pan parents "know how they want their efforts to make long-term effects in the lives of their children. And act accordingly in their commitments."

You can learn more about Peter Pan Cooperative Preschool at www.peterpancoop.com.

Monte McClain can be reached at mcclainmonte\@sbcglobal.net.