Seeing with New Eyes

Four weeks into our inaugural year  and Wake Young Women's Leadership Academy continues to define itself. We have yet to have a full week of school without celebration, interruption, schedule change, a late bus or a carpool family that is still learning the rules. Monitoring student compliance to our uniform policy continues to be a daily activity.

And yet, even with our lack of ritual and routine, there are some assurances.that we are becoming a school.  As I walk the campus I observe teachers working each day to design and deliver engaging lessons; we want our girls to get involved with their learning - to lead in this critical process.

I am beginning to see girls settle down. They are starting to understand that we are not playing school; we are doing school and it is hard work if we hope to accomplish anything worthwhile.

Most importantly, a process of transformation from our place as guests on the Governor Morehead School Campus (GMS) to a school community is beginning to occur. The process began when GMS leaders provided a glimpse into who the GMS community is. Mr. Benton's and Ms. Jackson's stories of their academic careers at GMS and the impact they have had on the blind and visually impaired community opened our eyes to see that potential is unlimited if you see yourself as a leader and are committed to making an impact for yourself and your community. Meeting the GMS student body president was our first introduction to a GMS student - his vision for a successful school year sounded a great deal like the words in so many WYWLA application essays.

I really think the greatest days of our year thus far came during week two when we had the opportunity to meet and greet the GMS students.Each WYWLA girl had the opportunity to make introductions to their GMS fellow students...and they learned that they have much in common. They are all students who have to study, who have hobbies, interests and talents. They like to laugh and tell stories and they have hopes and dreams for their own lives.

While the students were making introductions, I had the opportunity to speak with a GMS staffer. As we watched our students together, her eyes filled with tears. She said that initially she harbored real fears and concerns about the way our campuses would work together. GMS has been a cherished place for the students and the faculty; what would the arrival of 150 new students mean to the GMS identity and its family? On this special day, what she and I both began to see was how much we all have in common. Our students taught us that; they led the way in that moment and they continue to be a guiding light for all of us.

Today as I supervised breakfast in the dining hall, I noticed a group of girls  - two GMS girls and two WYWLA girls. What I heard was laughter. They were chatting like old friends with the exuberance that can only be middle school girls. I have no idea what was so funny; I only know that I saw one community of children gathered in a dining hall that is a centerpiece to their daily learning, leading and living. They see the possibilities of new friends and we see girls becoming the kind of young women in whom we can all be proud.

Transitions

The month of August often brings with it great anxiety. Children are anxious to savor the last days of summer vacation and simultaneously anxious about starting a new year of school. Parents and families start the transition back to routines that summer allows us to shed with glee and relief…where did the June and July go?

For me, August 2012 has been a time of great transition. My husband and I spent the first two weeks helping our daughters, Laura and Virginia, move into their apartments. Each of them have planned for this move for some time, gathering furniture and accessories to make their new spaces not just a place to live, but a home. They are both living with new roommates – anyone who has ever had a roommate can certainly appreciate the anxiety that can come with that! And Richard and I are empty-nesters, a new phase in our marriage.

August 2012 also signifies the end of the planning stage of Wake Young Women’s Leadership Academy. Maintenance and operations specialists, furniture movers, and WYWLA faculty and staff devoted countless hours to creating a learning environment suited to our school’s  purpose to education young women to become 21^st century leaders and learners.  Throughout the last weeks of July I was anxious about whether it would all come together in time; thankfully,  none of my worst fears were realized and most of my hopes and dreams have come true.

The Olympic salute, “Let the games begin!” certainly applied on August 13, when our community spirit tunnel announced the arrival and entrance of our first classes of students. Even with all of the fanfare, I had to pinch myself to confirm that it was all very real! 

My transition from visionary and planner of an all girls leadership academy to leader of Wake Young Women’s Leadership Academy has begun.  I am working with an outstanding faculty and staff who are creative and dedicated; watching them work with our students is inspirational, so I am spending much of my day visiting classrooms. This allows “my girls” to get to know me as well. My presence sends the message that I care about their learning and want them each to use their time wisely.

This week transitions continue for all of us as the Governor Morehead Campus students and families return. They, too, are beginning a great time of transition.  We will all learn new routines as we share the beautiful GMS campus and its facilities. I am confident that each school community will reflect on the decision to unite us and wonder what we may have been so anxious about in the first place.

The transitions of August will soon become the routines of the fall. My hope is that as this occurs in my daughters’ apartments, my household, and my new school campus we will make the shift from just an apartment, house, and a campus to a home where we can develop significant, enduring relationships as we live, learn, and lead together. 

Good Fortune

I love getting fortune cookies. They always follow a savory meal at my favorite Asian restaurants where my taste buds and my nostrils have been tantalized with fresh, crisp vegetables and spices.

After the meal, I crack open my fortune cookie to find a simple statement that I am certain has been written just for me:

Your mind is filled with new ideas: explore them.

A new outlook brightens your image and brings new friends.

If you put up with small annoyances, you will gain great results.

Luck happens when hard work meets opportunity.

The power of these fortunes rests in my disposition. Sometimes they appear to be trite; others are simply corny. Occasionally I find the words of the fortune to be a special prompt – an aha! moment if you will. And most are gentle reminders of the ability and opportunity in all of us to make good fortune of our lives – wherever, whenever, and however we can.

My recent favorite reads like this,

Past experience: He who never makes mistakes never did anything that’s worthy.

Powerful words as I consider all that is promised and expected at Wake Young Women’s Leadership Academy. My hope is that every part of this year and the years to come will be filled with exponential successes.

Reality: there are going to be mistakes and lessons learned. The challenge will be to savor the fortune of the moment and determine how to move beyond it and the mistake.

The fortune cookie reminds me, too, of my good fortune to be a part of this exciting new venture. I have just begun to “crack open” the wit and wisdom of each of the faculty and staff who are committed to this project’s success.  My recent “sampling” of their new ideas, new outlooks, and hard work has left me anxious to explore with them the excitement of our first year together. In them I hope to find new friends and great results.

As I think about each of the young women who will start the school year at WYWLA in August, each of them holds a “fortune” inside that we will be challenged and inspired to discover. Each day will provide an opportunity for them to discover new ideas, meet new friends, and have great results. Most importantly, they will be challenged to apply hard work to the opportunities provided at WYWLA.

As the anticipation builds for the first day of school, my latest fortune reads, “You will receive a surprising gift very soon.” Perhaps that gift will be meeting one of you! 

Desserts

May in North Carolina is absolutely beautiful, isn’t it? The weather calls us to work in our gardens, take a long walk with the family pet, barbecue with friends and family, or simply settle down in a hammock, lounge chair or a beach towel in the grass to read a new novel or article. A day at the lake always brings my family together for a good time.

The beauty of May can easily become overshadowed by the stress of standardized tests. Schools send out messages to remind parents about the importance of daily attendance during testing. Teachers dedicate themselves to preparing reviews and practices hoping to add the final touches to a year of hard work to ensure that each student achieves high growth.  Parents check and double-check alarm clocks to verify wake-up times so students won’t suffer through make-up testing due to a tardy.

Additionally if you have a child who is approaching a major transition – from elementary to middle school or middle to high school or to seventh grade in a brand new school – stress levels elevate tremendously. Is my child really prepared to make this transition? Did we choose the best school? How will we manage the new school schedule? How will the transportation really work?

I can appreciate the stress of this time of year as well. For me, the arrival of May means that the opening of our new school is just around the corner. While I have worked diligently each day to build the best team and cultivate a passion for our school’s mission and vision since November, May has arrived and I am beginning to feel the stress of what still must be done – and the expectations that we have set for the Wake Young Women’s Leadership Academy. We have told many candidates applying for a position at our school that we cannot have any mistakes – especially this first year as everyone in the community has their eyes on us!

And then I remember something I learned a long time ago:

STRESSED spelled backwards is DESSERTS!

 I am confident that when we look back on this beautiful month of May we will enjoy the much-deserved desserts of our hard work!

Let’s add another scoop of our favorite ice cream to a cone and enjoy this beautiful time of year.

Making It Personal

On an amazing Friday afternoon in downtown Raleigh, I met with Emma and Donna, a wonderful daughter and mother pair, to discuss the Wake Young Women’s Leadership Academy. Being the emerging, independent thinker that she is, Emma made the decision to apply to WYWLA back in the fall…and told her parents that this school was exactly where she wanted to be.  When she received her acceptance letter and attended the open house, she was still excited…

…And then spring came and all of Emma’s friends were talking about their high school registration process. They were choosing courses and making plans to attend the local high school…and Emma wasn’t.  Maybe WYWLA wasn’t the right choice? What did she actually know about what her freshman year of high school would be at WYWLA? So much seemed undefined, uncertain.

This is where Donna comes in. Donna is a wonderful mom – the kind of mom Haley Kilpatrick describes in The Drama Years when she says, “…girls don’t need another best friend; they need a parent. A great middle school mom might have a lot of the characteristics of a friend, but ultimately, you’re [the parent] the guardrail, the safety net, in her life” (p. 197).

Donna arranged for our meeting on that perfect April day –to help each of us get to know each other better and to engage in conversations about the promising future both she and Emma see as they think about what lies ahead. Most importantly, our conversation provided a great opportunity for Emma to ask me all the questions that were on her mind. Note here: Emma asked me questions and Donna listened and inserted occasionally. Donna’s invitation to meet with me had been the safety net that Emma needed to help her remain committed to WYWLA.

After I left our meeting with this pair, I reflected on how many more of these conversations are occurring throughout the WYWLA community. Maybe they are about a daughter’s decision to take the risk to attend  WYWLA. Maybe they are about changes in friend groups or the pressures of the end of the year with end-of-grade testing looming. What I hope is that in each home “Emma” is comfortable talking with “Donna.” I hope “Donna” is making time…just listening, as Haley suggests.

I also thought about my own relationships with my children, and especially with my daughter Virginia, who has just finished her freshmen year at UNC-Chapel Hill. I talked to Virginia nearly every day of her freshman year – many times on the way home from work to help me remain calm during heavy traffic! Yes, I may have been checking on her occasionally, but what I was really doing was making time for her and just listening to the excitement of her day or her worry about a class or a test or letting her know about my new venture. You see, Virginia is one of my best friends. We lived through the drama years of middle school by talking to each other – parent to child. Now, we can talk adult to…almost adult… and the conversations are as refreshing as the breeze Emma, Donna and I enjoyed on that spring Friday afternoon. 

Do It Anyway

Years ago I developed a leadership seminar on the Harvard Business School professor Bill George’s concept of authentic leadership. Simply put, authentic leadership is being committed to the truth and acting on that truth. It requires clarity about what one values and believes. Authentic leaders consistently communicate that truth in all of their leadership and life roles. The past few weeks have provided opportunities to demonstrate my authentic leadership.

You may have seen the April 10, 2012 Wake County Public School System Board of Education information session where my colleagues and I shared statistics on the progress of the Wake Leadership Academies. We knew Board members would ask questions and offer challenges to our work. Leadership requires answering tough questions and critics’ challenges.

When Superintendent Tata asked me to speak about early college leadership experience, my authentic leadership was on full display. From Wake Early College of Health and Science’s incredible academic results to the immeasurable personal gains that I saw in each of the students, I informed the Board about what can happen on an early college campus.  Realizing I had been center stage for a while, I closed with the understatement, “I am just a little bit passionate about this subject!” 

This passion, this truth, has been the driving force of my efforts to lead Wake Young Women’s Leadership Academy. Parents, students, and potential faculty members have responded in a similar fashion– a statement of their values and beliefs that a single gender learning environment focused on developing each student’s authentic leadership is a great choice for our community.

I dashed from the Board meeting to speak to a group of National Honor Society inductees. You guessed it – the topic was leadership. The National Honor Society, an organization that we will establish for deserving Wake Young Women’s Leadership Academy students, upholds the values of scholarship, service, integrity and leadership.

My remarks addressed my belief that leadership is the point at which the other tenets intersect. Leaders must dedicate themselves to study, to intellectual engagement and to self-improvement. I emphasized the important responsibility that leaders have to serve others. I believe that leaders are gifted – gifted by their families with love and support, gifted by their teachers with challenges that develop critical thinking and sound reasoning, and gifted by their communities through formal and informal mentoring and investments that come from unique experiences. As such, they must serve others. Finally, leaders are ultimately judged by their character, their integrity. A leader may be forgiven a mistake in a statistic or a fact, but they may never recover from a mistake in judgment that violates our common core values and beliefs about what is right and wrong in life and leadership. I closed with a poem attributed to Mother Teresa of Calcutta: Do It Anyway.

…and then we received the news that our vision for a partnership with William Peace University would not be realized. With the Superintendent leading us all, we acted and continue to move forward with contingency plans to assure that the Wake Leadership Academies will open in August as planned.

The real challenge to what I believe about leading an innovative school quickly became the primary issue for me to address. Family and friends questioned me as to whether I had any regrets about my decision to lead the school. Individuals who made commitments to participate in this unique learning community sought reassurance that they, too, had made the right decision.

My response: given the opportunity to lead the Wake Young Women’s Leadership Academy again, I would Do It Anyway because I believe in our mission to develop each young woman as a leader capable of realizing her authentic leadership.

Do It Anyway

The Paradoxical Commandments

By Dr. Kent Keith

Modified by Mother Teresa with application to a spiritual context

People are often unreasonable,
illogical and self-centered;
Forgive them anyway.

If you are kind,
people may accuse you of selfish ulterior motives;
Be kind anyway.

If you are successful,
you will win some false friends and true enemies;
Succeed anyway.

If you are honest and frank,
people may cheat you;
Be honest anyway.

What you spend years building,
someone could destroy overnight;
Build anyway.

If you find serenity and happiness,
they may be jealous;
Be happy anyway.

The good you do today,
people will often forget tomorrow;
Do good anyway.

Give the world the best you have,
and it may never be enough;
Give the world the best you’ve got anyway.

Girls on the Edge

This week I finished Dr. Leonard Sax’s book, Girls on the Edge: The Four Factors Driving the New Crisis for Girls.  Some of you may have attended Dr. Sax’s lecture when he visited St. Mary’s School earlier this year. WYWLA Dean of Students, Julia Taylor, and I spent time with him at the National Coalition of Girls’ School Annual Conference we attended in February.

Dr. Sax’s text is filled with anecdotes of his experiences with girls through his work in pediatrics and psychology; he shares stories about his visits to girls’ schools around the country. Moreover, he presents his findings with hope that it is within our power and it is our responsibility as parents, as educators, and as a community to bring our girls safely “back from the edge” so they will realize their full potential.

On page 203 of the book, Dr. Sax talks about his visit to PACE Center in Orlando, FL. Director Jill Gentry states, “Once a girl at this school [PACE] finds her voice, she will not lose it.” I paused as I read this; Gentry has described one of the outcomes Ms. Taylor and I envision for WYWLA students. Ms. Taylor is dedicating her time to developing the Girls Leadership Class (GLC), a cornerstone to our students’ experiences. GLC will meet daily for 30-minutes with each faculty member working closely with a small group of our students to guide them in discovering and employing the power of their voice. Each year GLC will have a specific thematic focus, with a culminating school-wide project.  As we interview candidates for teaching positions each Saturday, we are sharing GLC with them to ensure that they understand and are enthusiastic about the program. Our collaborative commitment to GLC will ensure that our students not only find their voices, but also that they share it!

In the same chapter, Dr. Sax writes, “One reason I’ve become a proponent of girls’ schools is because a girls’ school can so easily provide an authentic community of girls and women.” WYWLA certainly intends to create an inclusive community of women and men who are working on behalf of our girls.

To that end, Ms. Taylor and I are building partnerships throughout the Raleigh community to ensure that our students are supported within and beyond our school. This week I met Cynthia Marshall, President, AT&T North Carolina, who enthusiastically expressed support of our school.  She facilitated Vision 2015: Workforce Development Strategic Planning Forum, as part of the North Carolina New Schools Project strategic planning process. Mrs. Marshall is committed to a vision for North Carolina in which each child is college and career ready.

We also attended the Raleigh Chamber of Commerce Board of Directors and Advisors to present Wake Leadership Academy. This gathering afforded us the opportunity to inform entrepreneurial women and men about our school. We have invited them to participate with us to develop a comprehensive career development program that includes speakers, business lunches, volunteering, job shadowing, and internships. Their enthusiastic reception encourages us to believe that we will be able to provide each senior an internship as part of our academic program.

The only edge that WYWLA students will approach with be the edge of possibility. As a community, we will help them soar.

Teresa Pierrie