FREEPORT

Merriconeag Waldorf High School, the only Waldorfphilosopy secondary school in the state, has received exemplary marks by a national certification body.

After a 30-month application and review process, New England Association of Schools and Colleges, or NEASC, bestowed national accreditation upon Merriconeag in June.

Merriconeag board members, administrators and staff received the good news with equal parts joy and relief: Administrator Christine Sloan said they all were confident of their facilities’ merits, but nobody wanted to seem smug.

Although the facility already had achieved accreditation for its early childhood and elementary education programs, the NEASC designation carries a kind of umbrella credibility that validates the school’s overall mission.

“It’s the gold-standard of pedagogical accreditation,” said development coordinator Lynne Espy.

A seven-member team from NEASC visited the Merriconeag campus and spent several weeks observing classrooms, talking to administrators, interviewing parents and older students, and poring through the school’s accounts and book keeping.

First step for Espy, administrator Christine Sloan, admissions director Lyn Baird and other staff was to rewrite and craft the school’s mission statement to reflect its updated K-12 purview.

“We spent months on that,” Sloan said, “and to have that recognized was really gratifying.”

Merriconeag’s main campus is on Desert Road; the high school is temporarily housed in Gray Hall on the Pineland Farms complex in New Gloucester, but fundraising is under way to build a dedicated high school on the main campus. The original elementary school was founded in 1984 with a handful of students; a secondary program started in 2007 with six students in a combined ninth and tenth grade. Three classes have graduated so far, and 12 more students will matriculate in 2013.

Enrollment is now at 250 students across all grade levels.

The Waldorf education model, developed in the late 1800s by Austrian philosopher and educator Rudolf Steiner, is widely used in Europe. It differs from a traditional American public school curriculum in that Waldorf schools focus more prominently on the arts and less on a structured, exam-driven classroom schedule. All students take a second language beginning in the primary grades, participate in theater and chorale, and learn to play at least one musical instrument.

Teachers stay with the same class of students from grades one through eight. Additionally, early grades incorporate movement, singing, storytelling and frequent play to “feeling as well as learning,” said Sloan, the administrator.

Older students take courses in blacksmithing, knitting, woodworking and other agricultural or fine arts.

High school senior Ben Tindall attended Merriconeag from early childhood until high school, when he spent his freshman year at Freeport High, before returning to Merriconeag. Academically he was well-prepared, but said the cultural change took getting used to.

“It wasn’t a horrible experience,” said Tindall, who is 18 and from Durham. “But it just feels like Waldorf teachers are more approachable, more open to what works for you as a student.”

Classes there are “two-way learning and discussion, rather than a one-way lecture,” said Zoe Oswald, a 17- year-old senior from Auburn.

She went to public elementary schools and joined Merriconeag at the start of high school. She and another senior classmate, Skyler Samuelson, 18, lauded the flexibility of a Waldorf education as one of the benefits of its humanistic curriculum. During the “Arab Spring” uprising of 2011, when disaffected youths throughout the Middle East demonstrated and rioted to force a political change in leadership, humanities teacher David Barham scrapped an entire quarter’s lesson plan on South America to focus instead on geopolitics and cultural revolution.

“I mean, you’d never see that happen in another (public) school,” Samuelson said. “Mr. Barham just thought it was more important.”

There are more than 100 Waldorf middle schools in North America and fewer than 40 high schools. A survey of Waldorf students in the United States and Canada, conducted by the Research Institute for Waldorf Education, found that 94 percent of graduates attended post-secondary schools, 47 percent chose humanities or arts as their majors and 42 percent chose math or science.

jtleonard@timesrecord.com