Valley of the Sun Waldorf Education Association

Our Mission

Inspired by Rudolf Steiner’s Waldorf education system, the mission of Desert Marigold School is to provide an educational context that emphasizes not only intellectual achievement, but also the imaginative, artistic, and moral growth of its students. By addressing their heads, hands and hearts, the school will encourage students to be life-long learners and independent thinkers as well as self motivated, self-disciplined, creative, adaptable and responsible individuals.

We seek to establish and maintain a school that provides an individualized, nurturing approach to educating its students, preparing them not only for higher education, but for the rest of their lives. We will require and use an active partnership of teachers, families and the community, as well as a continued affiliation with the world-wide Waldorf movement to achieve the following goals:

1. To ensure each child’s excellence in core academic skills by providing a curriculum enlivened with the arts of painting, music, drama, movement, singing, sculpture and hand work.

2. To educate according to age and development, so that learning and growth are united.

3. To present the curriculum in multiple and integrated ways, so students have many different opportunities to learn concepts, as well as see the relationship to the larger whole.

4. To nourish the spirit of curiosity so that students continue to learn long after the end of formal training.

5. To encourage fundamental values and life skills, including responsibility, perseverance, integrity, self-discipline, trustworthiness, craftsmanship, friendship and compassion.

6. To make available this quality of education for all ethnic and socioeconomic sectors in our community.