Many of us crave the creative life. We work on canvases, in workshops, on computers, in studios or back yards, making paintings, furniture, stories, dances, music, or gardens. But it takes an extraordinary artist whose canvas is a $36-million-dollar school building. When I talked with Principal Kim Short of Fuquay-Varina’s new South Lakes Elementary School in July, I was struck by how much her answers resembled those of the 80 designers in 20 disciplines that I interviewed a decade ago one-by-one at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) to discover how design expertise develops.
How to Design a Community
The designers, ranging from architecture to game development to industrial design, begin with framing a problem. They next envision their solutions, specify what they need, prepare the ideas and skills they will need, and only then implement their solution. For every step, they question over and over to make sure their solution is the best they can make it.
Inspiring designers from SCAD frame problems “using aesthetics, costs, and life enrichment to help users reimagine wants, needs, and opportunities.” For educational design this would mean thinking about what is appealing and beautiful to learners; being wary of costs; and above all, being always mindful of how to enrich the lives of learners. Sometimes enrichment means helping learners to have new ideas about what they want or need and sometimes it means creating opportunities for them that they did not expect.
When I asked Principal Short to tell me about her process, she opened with a sentence and expanded it into easily remembered goals. “You have to create a sense of what your picture is. Mine is that I want the school to feel like home, like a place that people want to come to.” That fits right in with the most advanced designers envisioning solutions “by empathizing, analyzing, and integrating other people’s understandings and emotions.”
Principal Short honed her knowledge of community creation for decades as a special education teacher and Principal at Ballentine Elementary School. As she told me, “You can build it, but it takes people to create community.”
Designers must specify what they need to carry out their visions, and that is exactly what Principal Short did when she created the school’s theme. “We greet everyone with ‘Welcome, we’re glad you’re HERE.’” For the staff of “the Lake” (the school’s nickname), “HERE” is a not-too-secret code that stands for High expectations, Enthusiasm, Restorative Practices, and Engagement. It has guided the thorough preparations that have gone into opening day for the school.
High Expectations
Allowing any child to slide through school has long been shown to undermine the development of their knowledge and skills. High expectations remind everyone to give their best effort to everything they do.
Enthusiasm
Enthusiasm is as important for teachers as students, making education more fun for both. Principal Short describes her staff as creating a “magnetic attraction to the school family that they would create even in the oldest building in the system.”
Restorative Practices
Readers may remember “Restorative Practices” from last year’s Suburban Living story on Lincoln Heights. There, Principal Grant described them as “ways to give voice to those who too often in our society have been deprived of their voice. Everyone sits in a circle and the organizer begins with a prompt like ‘What is your greatest hope for the week?’” Principal Short adds that such circles create a sense of common values and help children to picture school as a family. Restorative Practices began in prisons but have gained growing support in schools since a United States Department of Education initiative in 2012.
Since Restorative Practices came up in a second Fuquay-Varina school, I decided to do a little research on them. Three findings bode well for their implementation at South Lakes. First, other schools across the nation found that such programs work best when they are consistently applied across the school. Principal Short reports that eighty percent of the staff have taken the two-day Circle Keeping training based on well-known sources like Kay Pranis’ book Peacemaking Circles: From Crime to Community & Doing Democracy with Circles. Ninety-five percent have attended workshops that make them aware of the approach.
Secondly, trying to reverse the cat-and-mouse mindset of punitive discipline after years of experience can be difficult. At South Lakes, Restorative Practices are being taught from the beginning of school. I often remind people that memory is place dependent. In the future, when those who attended South Lakes or Lincoln Heights remember their first school, they will remember their Restorative Practices.
Third, using Restorative Practices only as reactions to disciplinary issues has not worked well. In contrast, at both Lincoln Heights and South Lakes, the approach is integrated into the everyday plan of “teaching the child, not just the curriculum.” Over and over, the SCAD designers mentioned how important collaboration is. You cannot construct a building or create an interactive game by yourself. Many mentioned how college students do not learn collaboration until they begin to discover what other people know that they do not and they cannot discover this without expressing their goals and skills. At South Lake’s Restorative Practices, children are learning how to collaborate at a very early age.
Engagement
The final E of “We’re glad you’re HERE” stands for engagement. Principal Short envisions a community where people want to belong. Like sea turtles, she aims to “create a space for each child to be comfortable in his or her shell.” Being proud of one’s heritage is a powerful force for developing resilience. Minorities have not fared well in the past at the hands of privileged majorities. The endurance of those who love and care for children can blend with respecting children for who they are to create new opportunities for them. That foundation for resilience is captured in the school’s commitment to engagement and equity.
The Tour of the Building
The thorough tour of the school that Principal Short gave me began and ended at the media center. A highlight was standing in a school-long hallway where the yellow hue reflecting off the east-most walls proclaims sunrise and the orange hue from the west-most walls relaxes into a sunset. In between, there are classrooms with collaborative spaces, smartboards, whiteboards, wobble chairs for active young children, and flexible spaces for all. An enormous multiuse space serves as a lunchroom, gymnasium, theater, and auditorium. A set of giant, sliding, floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall doors even allows two uses at once. Outside, drop-off zones have overhangs to protect children from the elements, even getting out of cars or buses. Outdoor spaces accommodate diverse educational needs ranging from classroom seating to play areas, sports courts and fields, plus a large, open-air, multiuse area called the “Splash Zone,” named after the school’s sea-turtle mascot.
The media center held surprises that revealed careful preparation. First, it is enormous with a variety of different types of spaces and a remarkably large collection of books. But more importantly, the South Lakes Elementary staff took special care to make the collection resemble the diversity of students—books for girls and boys, beginning to fluent readers, black, Hispanic, and white.
It is not just the books that reflect the school’s diversity; the faculty does as well. To supplement those who moved with Principal Short from Ballentine Elementary School, the new school’s search teams held 150 interviews on Google Meets from March through May. Only 60 applicants were selected to be new faculty. Their diversity not only matched that of the children (they even had a higher number of male teachers than is common in elementary schools), but they also matched the commitments to high expectations, enthusiasm, Restorative Practices, and engagement of “We’re glad you’re HERE!”
Educating in a Pandemic
Design is not complete until it is implemented, but the shell of South Lakes was up before the scourge emerged. So our interview moved on to how to educate in the pandemic. Principal Short did not say so, but as a former educator and teacher educator, I fear for school personnel. The best teacher education programs teach how to develop knowledge through love and respect for children, but I know of none that also teaches the courage to face a significant death threat in order to help families care for their children, provide food, and pay the bills. Teachers and nurses have joined firefighters, police, and military personnel as people who risk their lives for modest pay to protect the rest of us. We should treat them as heroes.
For online schooling, the priority is to keep students connected. Wake County schools will adhere to the state’s standards. Principal Short commented that online learning is also an opportunity to look at education differently. She articulated how children are different from those who teach them. Education is much less fact-oriented now than it was before the internet. Today’s children care less about the facts (and should care less about them) than about how to use the facts. Smartphones make facts much easier to come by than before. Now, educators need to teach learners how to critique and to question why, how, and where to apply what they learn. That sort of questioning is what the SCAD designers recommend as not a unique step of design, but a part of every step.
The challenge of online education is to keep learners engaged. One way that South Lakes teachers do that is through digital portfolios. What children do is kept online where they and their teachers can see progress from one term to the next. Papers get lost. Models crumble. But online documents and photos last as long as the site that holds them.
Frame the problem, envision the solution, specify what you need, prepare your knowledge and skills, query at every step, and then, you are ready to implement your design. For South Lakes, implementation occurs from its first school year and beyond.
Fuquay-Varina Education is Unusual
Many towns lack the relationship between schools and businesses that Fuquay-Varina has. As a complement to our new library’s free parking lot network, our chamber of commerce also has internet access in its parking lot for anyone who needs it. It has even created an exemplary creative venue by hosting monthly Education Council meetings under the remarkably enduring and effective leadership of Wanda Denning. On any given month, our meetings include nearly all of the principals of our schools. My first interview with a local principal was with Jonathan Enns talking about the plans for the new high school, now open in Willow Springs. He tipped me off about the superb relationship between the business community and the high school. Since then, I’ve interviewed four other local principals. As with the business community, they have a remarkably supportive relationship with each other. In the same way that Principal Kris Clark describes his middle school approach, they celebrate each other, challenge each other, and ultimately connect.
Anyone wondering whether high standards grow and spread in Fuquay-Varina schools should check out the last decade of progress at Willow Springs Elementary School under the leadership of Camille Miller. Enthusiastic support crops up often among our school leaders. Ideas like the Restorative Practices to discipline that I first heard about from Kim Grant at Lincoln Heights flow quickly from one Fuquay-Varina school to the next. Engagement among the principals is not a prenuptial rite, but an educational right for all children in our schools. As a life-long educator, I’m glad I settled HERE, where High standards, Enthusiasm, Restorative Practices, and Engagement are watchwords for good education. We’re lucky to have leaders in our schools like these. And as Principal Short put it, “There really is nowhere better to share a school community! Fuquay-Varina is indeed, ‘a dash more.’”
