For decades, Eli Winograd, who attended from 1987-1990, “was out of touch and paid no attention” to High Meadow. Today, he’s been back in the Kingston area for ten years and has a child in High Meadow’s 5th grade.
In the years between his 6th-grade graduation from High Meadow and his return in 2022 as a parent, Eli remembers hearing that the school had moved and expanded, but not much else. From the ages of 18 to 31, he lived “in a different place every year,” looking forward, not back.
“It was a period of transience," he says. "I went years without a bedroom to myself. I did a lot of traveling playing music. I was quite a rolling stone for a long, long time. I didn’t go to college and that was kind of natural to me, whatever that nature is that made it so hard for me to fit into public school, especially at a young age.”
Eli’s parents had moved him to High Meadow midway through his 2nd grade year. He’d been having conflicts with his teacher, ending up in the principal’s office “every day, to the point where I got the principal a Christmas gift. I was too smart and amazing for that place.”
Rather than continue down a path designed to fit Eli to the mold, his parents chose to send him to High Meadow, which was at the time run by a small group of parent-educators on a farm in New Paltz.
“Most of what I remember was playing outside, which we did for hours and hours everyday. It was at this little farmhouse at the edge of a forest. There was a big field you could play on, and they’d let us go in the woods and there was a stream out there. There was a boundary you weren’t supposed to go past, [but] most of my sense of being at that school was being out in the woods without any adults around. It was pretty wild stuff; I’m 100% grateful for that.”
“We did a lot of frog catching. I remember running up and down the stream at full speed jumping from rock to rock. A lot of pretty serious forest playing. There was a giant shale pit or quarry or something; it’s probably not as big as I remember it. It was like a giant cliff of shale that you would climb and then the shale would break apart and you would scrape your belly rolling down. A lot of stuff that wouldn't fly these days, in terms of supervision and insurance, but it was top to bottom a pretty underground situation.”
After arriving at High Meadow, Eli had moved from 2nd to 5th grade academic work. “I remember the math program,” he says. The math teacher was Tom Bradshaw, the partner of Mimi Labourdette, one of the co-founders of High Meadow. “[He] was pretty passionate and unconventional in his approach. He wore sweatpants.” Eli recalls doing “a lot of logic-based math, hardly any arithmetic,” including lots of Venn diagrams and “arrow roads,” an exercise using logic-based decisions to move left or right.
“And I remember town meetings. It was about 30-40 kids, a pretty small population, so it was easy to get every single kid into one room and talk [something] out. I remember one of the years there there was a really intense Lord of the Flies dynamic happening in the woods that the adults didn’t really know about. It was developed for months and months. I remember a lot of town meeting time being used to work that out.”
At the time, High Meadow went through 6th grade, and Eli graduated with three other students. Two of them went on to careers in dance, a reminder that “dance was a huge thing at HMS.” A well-known local dance and social justice practitioner, Susan Slotnick, came from New Paltz once a week to teach, and “that snowballed pretty quickly into her basically starting a children’s dance company,” Eli says.
“It’s not much of an exaggeration to say the entire school population was in this woman’s dance company. We would rehearse all year, culminating in an elaborate show with many costume changes and all kinds of infrastructure at the big auditorium at SUNY New Paltz. It was a very important aspect of the school community at the time.”
“I was a troublemaker and pretty difficult kid to deal with,” Eli says, recalling high school as a time that “crushed his spirit.” At High Meadow, though, he remembers “school being a place where I liked to go and felt academically engaged and interested and relatively respected by the grown ups.”
Eli had never planned to return to the area, or to send his own child to HMS. He met his partner, Lark Kidder, on New Year’s Eve of 2011 – “the last New Years of the Mayan calendar” – at a party in Brooklyn. The chance to move to Kingston came their way in the summer of 2013 “out of a lucky opportunity to live in my grandparents house that needed to be cleaned out. It was like an escape route,” he says, a way to move out of the city without having to save up money. “We would have left Brooklyn at some point, but we had to make a quick decision.”
Six months later, Lark became pregnant, and the family settled into life as artists in the Hudson Valley. Eli worked for Arm of the Sea Theater and as a freelance recording engineer. He recalls reconnecting with High Meadow ten years ago, at the time of the 30th Anniversary. It was his first time on the current campus.
“Some of the old alumni were teaching,” he remembers, but by 2022, when his son, Igor, enrolled in 3rd grade, “I was the only connection to the early HMS.” The staff had turned over, and “it was like this other place, pretty different,” he says.
He and Lark had chosen High Meadow for Igor after the pandemic in response to changes at their public elementary school. “I had to do quite a lot of convincing to everyone that it would be a good idea,” Eli says. “The cost, for one thing. The main reason [was] to be at a place where the social atmosphere is more healthy.”
At today’s High Meadow, Eli recognizes the “emphasis on outdoor play and building, on imaginative play – a vein that runs the course of time. One thing that’s really different,” he notes, “is the socioeconomic paradigm that exists. When I went [to High Meadow], it didn’t cost much, and was a very different scene in terms of that.” His father taught music in exchange for his and his sister’s tuition, for example. “I think he got instruments donated. All the teachers were parents.”
“So the phenomenon, especially over the pandemic, of so many people literally moving to the area to put their kids in school, [with] the resources to just do that; it doesn’t matter, but it is a striking difference.”
“What High Meadow school is now is so obviously a school,” he says. In his day, “we had to explain that it was a school. It was a house with a bunch of kids running around,” where the dining room and living room were classrooms, and the yard was the playground. “The infrastructure is a major difference. When I was there, it was all imagination. Science class was just imagination – now there are, like, test tubes.”
Whether Eli was a trendsetter, or the timing just happens to be right, in the 2024-25 school year, he is joined in the community by two of his schoolmates from way back when: Aiko Pletch, parent, and Gwyneth Larsen, circus arts instructor in our Afterschool program.
He also finds himself with a full-time job for the first time in his life, signing on with Radio Kingston about a year ago to manage A/V systems for community and nonprofit events. This represents “a culmination of skills I’ve built up from my own independent study,” Eli says, “usually just having to do with being a musician and recording my music and doing sound stuff for music-related shenanigans. I parlayed that into a skill set I could capitalize on.”
Though the early days of High Meadow have faded, Eli embraces the change, offering one of the best descriptions we’ve heard of the authentic nature of progressive education: “It was a beautiful, unique situation that just was what it was, and became what it is, and it’s all cool.”
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