An alternative school for “School Refusers”

We arrived at Sopporo High school at about 5:00 pm, just in time to quickly tour the unusual “Eco-Void heating and cooling system”. The nuances of the this temperature control system were a bit lost on me, as fatigue was beginning to take a toll on my mental faculties. What I could gather through the fog of my exhaustion and the considerable garbling due to translation, was that the outside walls of the school were heated by solar radiation and the heated air was funneled through open windows into circular cement voids in the middle of building. Heated air in the winter or cooled air in the summer would circulate through these voids, resulting in the building requiring less of the more conventional temperature control like refrigerated air. At about 6:00 P.M. we begain our tour of classes. Yes it was a night high school. Sopporo High is considered an alternative school targeted at students who are not able or are unwilling to attend a regular highschool. The students who attend this kind of alternative school have typically not faired well in the traditional school system and dropped out of school. Japanese call these kind of children School Refusers. The reasons for refusing school are diverse. One explanation is that the predominate social pressure to conform to the group stresses some children to the point of choosing not to pqrticipate. Another explanation is even more dire – intense bullying. Sopporo High has created an atmosphere that is more relaxed to accommodate those students in need of more individuality. School uniforms are not required and students do not have to change into school slippers upon entering the building. The attire and appearance of Sapporo high school students reminded me of high school students you might encounter in any US city; ear piercings, dyed hair, high heals and rather revealing clothing – very few tattoos though – tattoos are considered highly inappropriate as they signify membership in the Yakuza , (Japan’s Underworld). In addition, the school has a considerable counseling system that helps students cope with their challenging social situations. Each day school starts with the home room where the teacher can check up on her students. IF the student is absent the teacher is required to call the child until he or she is reached. The aim of the school is to help the students complete high school while improving self esteem. In a question session with some students, we asked why they had chosen to attend Sapporo High. One boy answered that through his elementary and Jr. High school years, he was “unable” to go to school. He decided that he wanted to try to better himself and so chose this school as a way to do that. ESD is an intergral part of Sapporo High school, and an emphasis is placed on students understanding their role in the world and how disregard for environment leads to inequity and poverty. We followed some students as they tended their potato gardens and later practiced their Kanji to improve their hand-writing so that when they apply for a job, their handwriting does not exclude them from employment.

After school that evening, we ate dinner in the school cafeteria – which again did not follow the norm that we had experienced in all other Japanese schools, where students eat lunch in the classroom with their Sensai. At Sapporo High, students came as needed, bought or brought their lunch and cleared their dishes individually. This was a sharp contrast to the group effort that Japanese lunches are so famous for, where students serve each other, clean up after each other and eat communally.