Earlier this month, I welled with pride watching confident Southern High School students participate in an articulate, well-argued, impassioned Congressional debate on a bill raising the minimum wage. As their CA peer-mentors cross-examined them, both sides lighting up in delight from the equal intellectual exchange, I was struck by how far we have come and […]

Members of the Community Engagement Class tend the community garden at Alliance Medical Ministry in Wake County. How do students at a private school understand and respond to the critical needs in their community? One way a group of us tried to break out of our CA “bubble” was in an innovative class that began […]

Cary Academy is an academic powerhouse; it’s the San Francisco 49ers of the 80’s led by Joe Montana.  We smash ACT and SAT scores and rightfully flaunt Discovery, Innovation, Collaboration and Excellence.  Our halls are full of students donning the swag of their future: Davidson, Princeton, Cornell, our Triangle schools, and many more prestigious universities. […]

On Monday of this week, I broke an unwritten rule of the Upper School: I traipsed upstairs, and rather than follow the well-trod path toward the teacher lounge and the coffee machine, I turned right, threaded my way between the book bags, and plopped myself onto a couch in the Senior Corner. The seniors politely […]

Revolution is always justified.Inequality is inevitable.War brings progress. Provocative statements, certainly – and among those explored this spring in the seventh grade’s Great Debates. “The debates really help students see things from different perspectives,” explained history teacher Alicia Morris. “They don’t choose their topic or point of view, and they have to develop arguments in […]

What if 17-year-olds could perform surgical procedures on temporal bones? Go on the air with a local morning radio show? Design and sew their own shirts and ties? Or build 3-D models of homes? What if someone could do all of that – before they even graduated high school? Well, for starters, they’d be “co-creators […]

I have attended the National Association of Independent Schools’ People of Color Conference (PoCC) and Student Diversity Leadership Conference (SDLC) a whopping 15 times over the past 19 years!  Each year a courageous band of students and colleagues take a journey to a different location in the country to explore issues of diversity, inclusion, and […]