The teachers at the Sandpoint Waldorf School stay with their students throughout their eight-year journey at the school, progressing through each grade alongside the kids.

So for eighth-grade teacher Kelly Kietzman, next week’s production of “Les Miserables, Jr.” will be the final Waldorf play for her long-time class.

“I can picture all of these guys as little 6-year-olds in our first-grade play, which was a fairytale,” Kietzman said.

It is because they progress as they do, growing with the students as they perform a new play each year, that they were able to take on such an “ambitious” play as “Les Miserables,” Kietzman said.

“We know our students so well and we know what they are capable of, and we know where they need to grow,” she said. “... The really close, personal relationships between the teachers and the students really makes it possible to do something like this.”

Kietzman is directing the play along with seventh-grade teacher Sarah Shaffer and drama teacher Molly St. Pierre. There are 23 seventh- and eighth-grade students performing in the play, as well as two younger students. They started practicing about five weeks ago, Kietzman said, though they began some of the music classes in November, and got their parts in December.

The play is based on Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables,” she said, which takes place during a student revolution, several years after the French Revolution. For the Waldorf play, however, they have tried to leave the place and time up to the viewers imagination. People could think it is happening in the past, present or future, she said. To give it a modern twist, Kietzman said, the roles have been balance out between male and female characters as well, with the student revolutionaries made up of males and females, as opposed to a traditionally all male student revolution.

“The real revolution is the one of love ... how love revolutionizes how we are in the world, or doesn’t — if you don’t choose to have love as your guiding force,” Kietzman said, adding that not choosing love is the downfall of one character, the antagonist, of the play. “And Les Miserables, the miserables, it is about sort of this idea of the misery that can be in life, and the way to get past it is finding love in your life.”

Until this week, the group had been practicing in the basement at the school. However, Tamarack Aerospace let them build their set inside their hangar at the airport, which gives the kids plenty of room — and better acoustics — to practice with before moving everything to the Panida Theater for next week’s performance.

Every year, eighth-grade students do a project by taking on an apprenticeship for six to 12 months, Kietzman said. The set came together for the play after eighth-grader Aden Hietz began his apprenticeship with Peter Goetzinger, who Kietzman said is a set builder among other talents, in addition to being a previous Waldorf parent.

“They designed the set, and then built it and painted it, which is an incredible undertaking,” Kietzman said. “They have worked every weekend since November in making this happen.”

Performances will begin at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 27, and Thursday, March 28, in the Panida Theater, 300 N. First Ave., Sandpoint. Doors will open at 6 p.m., and cost is $7 per person.

Mary Malone can be reached by email at [email protected] and follow her on Twitter @MaryDailyBee.