“I was born on the South Side of Chicago,” Matthew Bigongiari says. “I went to the same grade school as my mom, the daughter of Jewish immigrants from France and Russia. She met my dad, an architect in Florence, on a visit to Italy. He came to the U.S. and studied at the University of Oregon School of Architecture. They got married, returned to Chicago and had three children: my sis, me and my brother.”
When Bigongiari was in middle school, his father decided to return to Italy. “I had two different teachers,” Bigongiari recalls, “one was Siquora Caruoci, a mean old person who taught children to fear her. I didn’t speak Italian well, so she made fun of me. The other was Fiorella Sarfati, who taught in a different method, lavorro di gruppo, groups of children researching a topic. She was a positive force in the lives of the children.”
The family remained in Italy only a year, as there was no work for Bigongiari’s architect dad. “Back in Chicago, I was great at the metric system,” Bigongiari reports, “and the teacher wasn’t, so I taught the metric system to the class.”
After high school, Bigongiari came to Oregon and studied psychology at Reed College in Portland. “In 1985, I found work in a Portland Waldorf School, where arts are integrated into academics. Children sing and recite poetry every day in the classroom. Humans learn best if you don’t just appeal to the head. Instead, it’s ‘hand, heart, head.’ When I discovered Waldorf, I knew it was what I wanted to do.”
He studied Waldorf education at Rudolf Steiner College in Sacramento, became certified and taught for six years in Seattle and Sebastopol before coming to Eugene in 1996. After one year at the Renaissance School and four years at Oak Hill School, he and his first wife Sally opened the Village School, approved by the 4J District, in July of 2000. “In the first year, we had 37 kids in kindergarten and first and second combined,” he says. “We now have a waiting list for every grade, every year, a lottery to get in, and low turnover among staff, teachers and children.”
This year, the Village School will celebrate its 25th anniversary with a party on May 31. School co-founder Bigongiari, known to his students as Mr. B, will retire in June after 35 years as a classroom teacher.