St. Michael’s is a private Orthodox Christian elementary school in southwest Santa Rosa, in beautiful Sonoma County, California. The school started in 1994 and is deliberately small. Currently we have 19 students.  With three experienced teachers, the children receive a well-rounded education, filled with art, poetry, practical work experience and loving attention.

Children thrive and develop in a warm, personal setting and this is the atmosphere we maintain at St. Michael's. Some have called it "the next best thing to home school." Although we are an Orthodox Christian school, not all students are Orthodox. They have come from many religious backgrounds.

In 2006, our local paper, The Press Democrat, ran a short article about our church and school. They described the property as "a sanctuary of swaying trees and tidy buildings, a 2-acre island of tranquility." Please visit the church's web site at holydormitionchurch.org.

We hope that parents who may be interested in St. Michael's will get a good sense of the spirit of the school through this site, especially the sections History and Philosophy, Articles on Education, and Newsletters.

The parents of our students are working together to produce a newsletter a few times a year. To see the latest one, click here.  We also have PDF files of newsletters produced in previous years.  You may find these in the Newsletters section of the web site.

We also hope that other parents and teachers can benefit from our combined 50+ years experience in homeschooling and in the classroom.

On Saturday, May 15, 2010, our church and the students' parents will host the fourth annual St. Michael's Celtic Festival.  It is sure to be a wonderful family event as well as a  fund raiser for St. Michael's Orthodox School.

In the early afternoon we will enjoy many different craft activities, and an Irish High Tea, listen to several Irish music jam sessions and hear a lecture about Ancient Celtic Christianity. At 3:00 pm, we will process to the school playground (also called St. Michael's Meadow) to have our local version of Scottish Highland Games. We will throw large stones as far as we can, toss a heavy weight backwards over a bar 12-15 feet in the air, and have probably several wonderful tugs-o-war.  In the evening, we will be taken back to old Ireland with the music and stories of Patrick Ball, a well-known Celtic harpist and story-teller.

Before the time of modern "entertainment", people enjoyed life and one another in the sharing of music, games and crafts. Leisure time was a time of creativity, not a time of passivity. These activities strengthened the sense of community and appreciation of others - something that modern entertainment fails to do.

In our church's annual Harvest Fair in the autumn and St. Michael's Celtic Festival in the spring, we try to give our children (and ourselves) a taste of the joy of community, a taste of the joy of a life in Christ.

For pictures and videos of last year's festival, go to holydormitionchurch.org and click on Celtic Festival.