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MARY JANE PARKAfter 27 mind-expanding years, Molly Barnes will ease away from her unconventional little school.
GULFPORT - SunFlower School met in a small space at Gulfport Presbyterian Church in 1977, when Molly Barnes became its co-director, with Marie Breslin.
On Friday, the last day of the current academic year at SunFlower, Barnes will retire, sort of. She'll no longer be a classroom teacher at the private elementary school, although she'll continue some administrative involvement.
Barnes' husband, Andy, retired as chairman and chief executive of the St. Petersburg Times on May 15, his 65th birthday. Molly Barnes, 63, decided to join him.
Next August, she'll be able to sleep past 5:30 in the morning and to arrange weekday lunch and play dates with adult friends.
Barnes graduated from Brown University and earned a master's degree at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her specialties were art and art education. In Washington, D.C., where she and her husband lived before moving to St. Petersburg, they opened the Harvard Street School.
SunFlower was founded in the early 1970s by new graduates of Florida Presbyterian (now Eckerd) College as the area's first "free school" experiment, and the staff still jokes about its whole-grain, free-range character.
"We were breastfeeding while we were putting long division up on the (chalk) board," Barnes said last week between cleaning up after a cooking project and heading off to the school's weekly dance class, where she shed her Birkenstock sandals and did the steps barefoot.
Students at SunFlower are expected to write every day. They learn to read music by second grade. They master computer keyboard skills. They have weekly music, dance and cooking lessons, present annual art shows and Shakespeare productions, and travel to the Keys for marine science camp. They garden and tend creatures such as fish, snakes and groundhogs. Teachers are generous with hugs.
Students call teachers and staffers by their first names. "After all, we call them by their first names," Barnes said.
"We like to think of it as a supportive structure, like a grapevine or a trellis, instead of a confining structure, like a jail," Barnes said.
One day last week, having taken lunch outdoors, students soaked each other with squirt guns and other water toys, reloading them in a kiddie pool on the tiny campus.
The "very nonprofit school," as Barnes calls it, has a few more classrooms than it did 27 years ago but still operates on the church grounds.
At a Saturday reunion for SunFlower alumni and their families that doubled as a celebration honoring Barnes, she spoke of "this wonderful little school that endures," of "hot-air balloons that never got off the ground, hundreds of class pets and burials and funerals," and trips years ago in which "all the parents (were) in a huddle with sweet-smelling fumes, and (teachers and staff) were entertaining the kids."
When SunFlower once expanded to include middle school level classes, the "kids immediately found porn sites on the computer," she recalled.
Dozens of adults and near-adults filled the Gulfport Coliseum for Saturday's event, where table decor featured fresh sunflowers and student-made paper sunflowers in galvanized buckets. A multimedia retrospective and alumni elicited laughter and tears.
At the close of the evening, Barnes said Tuesday, all the guests sang a round in four parts.
It was an appropriate farewell to a career dedicated to having children learn and play well together, where her stated goal always was to look back on a day's work and be able to say: "I was a good teacher today."