What a community needed. What I built.

After months of isolation and sheltering in place, our faculty and staff were returning to campus fearful and uncertain, and preparing to welcome children who felt the same. The moment called for more than a week of pre-planning. We needed to find our emotional center as a community, to remember what connects us rather than what divides us, and to build excitement for a year that promised to be challenging.

I was new to the school, still learning its culture, its colleagues and its leaders, so I moved thoughtfully to bring the right people and pieces together. Over the summer, I partnered with teachers and leaders across all three divisions to design Faculty Forum, a week of preparation before students arrived.

The opening day had to be a moment, and we delivered. I led a kickoff grounded in research on the power of story to heal and restore. We began with what that research reveals, heard from a panel of teachers on the challenges and welcome surprises of sheltering in place, and listened as colleagues, myself among them, shared their own stories. Breakout spaces then gave every teacher room to connect and tell theirs.

When I arrived, the school’s travel program had two problems. It excluded students who couldn’t afford to travel, and the trips themselves centered on shopping rather than true cultural immersion and community service.

I rebuilt it. Every trip gained a volunteer component. Scholarships and local day-trip options opened the door for students in need, and for those who couldn’t travel, I created a full day of community service on our own campus. We grew from five international trips to ten, adding local experiences and college and Black history tours within a day’s drive. Far more affordable than overseas travel, these options opened the program to many more students. One, an immersive city experience, made Atlanta itself a classroom.

The same fairness extended to faculty. Where a few teachers had traveled at no cost year after year while others were left out, we brought equity to the selection process, making it possible for more educators to experience travel and bring it back to their classrooms.

Across the program, student volunteer work on campus and throughout the city built lasting connections between the school and its wider community, and gave every student service hours to carry onto their college applications.

For years, the middle school summer program served a single purpose: students enrolled to get ahead academically or to catch up. Yet many new students join the school in the middle grades, and they needed more than a few credits. They needed a way in: a chance to step onto campus, absorb the culture of their new school, and form meaningful connections with teachers and classmates before the year began in earnest.

As director of a summer program serving 400 students and 30 faculty, I reimagined the middle school experience for these new families. What had been a few morning hours of class became a full-day immersive program, pairing academics and executive functioning with games and play, music in the quad, and a weekly visit from the ice cream truck. Connection was built into every part of the day.

Incoming students arrived in August already known, with friends and teachers waiting for them. The redesign also expanded summer employment for faculty and created a strong new revenue stream for the school.