Tal Birdsey and the Making of the North Branch School

Digital Extra: Xander Manshel talks to Tal Birdsey about the state of secondary education, his educational philosophy, and what life is like at North Branch.

Middle school is a terrifying place.

Students revile it. Parents endure it. And alumni—“survivors” seems the better term—work hard to forget it, or remember with an admitting cringe. No, middle school is not the place for romantic memories of youth to flourish. Rather, it is a circus tent, under which is packed a dazzling, if repulsive, collection of bizarre growths, untamable urges, and near-acrobatic anxieties. It is the purgatory of adolescence, a cruel middle ground that offers nothing but the distant prospect of getting beyond it. And yet, each of these comparisons fails to fully capture the singular truth of the middle school experience: it, like, sucks.

With this in mind, a group of parents from Ripton, Vermont—home to Bread Loaf, just east of Middlebury on mountainous Route 125—decided that middle school as they knew it would have to go. Fed up with the institutional feel of the local public school, hungry for a community alternative that better fit the needs of their kids, in the fall of 2000, they set out for something wholly different. They began the search for a head teacher.

A couple towns away in New Haven, Vermont, Tal Birdsey ’87, MA English ’93, was working as a stay-at-home dad to his two young sons. Originally from Georgia, Birdsey had moved back to Vermont a couple of years before, after 10 years of teaching at the Paideia School in Atlanta. Admittedly, starting a school had always been a dream of his. So when Mia Allen, one of the Ripton parents, first called him up and invited him to a community meeting to talk about their imaginary school, he jumped at the chance.

He was the perfect candidate. A graduate of both Middlebury and the Bread Loaf School of English, Birdsey was no stranger to Ripton or the mountain roads that led there. He knew Vermont well, but his Georgian twang made him stand out in a crowd. He was young enough to take on a backbreaking project like building a school, and experienced enough to maybe pull it off.  Perhaps most important, he believed that kids—the teenagers in Ripton, his own two young sons, all kids—deserved more from their schools. So after much philosophizing and imagining with local parents, after scores of meetings held around kitchen tables and woodstoves, Tal Birdsey took the job.

He was officially the headmaster and head teacher of a school with no name, no curriculum, no building, no books, and no students. Whatever.

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