WHY THIS SCHOOL MAKES SENSE FOR ME
“What I like about here is that it's small.”
“Pretty much my first seven years of teaching, I felt like I was just on my own. I didn't think I had enough professional development. I didn't think I had teacher support. I didn't really have a coach (...) Because those years were so bad, when I got [here] it was all or none. It had to check off all the boxes I wanted, and over my times in schools I was able to start crafting what I wanted in the school. One of the reasons why I left [my previous school] is that I was in a high school and I thought it was too late to help kids, because I was getting kids that were sixteen-seventeen and their mindsets were already fixed. There was no turning back. It was an epiphany for me because it helped me reflect on, Where in my life did I get that pivotal moment? It was in middle school. And it's because I went from a very big public school (…) to a small school where the teachers knew me.”
“I knew that I wanted a school that was small. I knew that I wanted a school that had the demographics that I wanted in the sense that when I taught my first year after college I taught in a private school and that's when I started crafting—I don't belong here (…) these kids don't need me.”
“By the time I got [here] I knew exactly what I wanted. So I wanted a small school. I definitely wanted to come to middle school. And then I wanted a demographic that fit what I grew up with, and where I could make the biggest difference. So [here] 50% of the population are immigrants.”
“I taught in a lot of schools that were 90% minority but I wanted a school that was reflective of America and I wanted kids to know that there are also White people. So [here] classes are very diverse (...) So kids don't wait until high school or college to see other people that don't look like them."
“As I got through my schools I started seeing a lot of systems break down, so a lot of miscommunication, a lot of red tape. (…) Here, the superintendent is actually the head of school because we're a one-school district, which is crazy to me. So my head of school is actually our superintendent. Whenever I have a question, I just go down the hallway.”
TEACHER COACH
“It wasn't until I came to this school that I was designated a teacher coach who was not my principal and I think that's one of the biggest reasons why I'm happy. Because of course everywhere you teach you're going to have a principal, but part of teaching and honing the craft is—you just want feedback on the teaching. You don't want all this other political, academic jargon—test scores and APPR and all of that. It's just good to focus on little things like, ‘Hey, this slideshow would benefit from a color change, because kids can't see from the back’. You don't get that from certain admin.”