Aiden McCrory
Student, STEAM Academy
Lexington, KY
A certain type of young man could be in constant trouble in many schools. The challenging and doubting of everything around him might drive some adults to… But that was the magic of meeting Aiden in what has become a safe place for him.
Aidan McCrory walked into the room and began a take-no-prisoners monologue about his experiences in school as a provocateur who relishes challenging assumptions, ideas, and opinions. He is an intense young man who holds nothing back about his perceptions of education’s failure to prepare young people to ask good questions, challenge inaccuracies especially inaccuracies advanced by those in authority, and to engage in debate using data and facts. He’s tall, thin, black, and smart. He is quick to point out that he sees school as needing a shakeup and he wants to be part of making that happen in schools.
We Learn Stuff
Argument, debate, and collaboration are at the center of how Aiden McCrory learns. “I want to be a lawyer,” the 16-year-old told us, “I have very strong opinions, but it’s not fun to argue my opinion, I’ll argue the opposite.”
The former urban elementary school in Lexington, Kentucky now inhabited by the STEAM Academy, a joint venture supported by the University of Kentucky and governed by Fayette County Public Schools, is a typical nondescript brick building indistinguishable from similar repurposed older school facilities all over the United States. What did distinguish it from traditional public high schools was obvious when we were met just inside the doors by teens lounging on the floor talking and collaborating on topics both personal and educational.
Passion-Based Learning
Like teens all over the world Aiden wants in on the conversations of his community and his nation. He talks about building a website on political polarization when, as a freshman, he was part of a mock trial on censorship that was overseen by a Lexington judge and a jury of parents. “We have the freedom here to follow our passions,” he says.
Real Life
Driving into Lexington, Kentucky the bluegrass pastures reminded us that we were entering what’s known as the “Horse Capital of the World.” Rock wall-lined country lanes bordered estate after estate and we commented to each other that the thoroughbreds dotting the fields likely were worth more than what a teacher on average makes in a year, sometimes many times more. When we googled that, we weren’t surprised that Fayette County’s Keeneland Auction House and Sales Company (which owns the historic landmark Keeneland race course) sold 6667 horses in 2019 for an average value of about $95,000 each. As that number popped up, we were passing pastures which held not just one or two thoroughbreds but 10 or more. In the areas surrounding Lexington the great wealth was obvious. Equally obvious, away from the University campus and the bourbon bars, was the poverty of so many. The gentrifying neighborhoods and those communities, mostly of color, with few resources, lay as a patchwork. Crossing a single street often felt like switching worlds.
“We as a nation have trouble talking about the things we need to talk about,” Aiden adds, but it’s obvious to see that schools like this, hands-on, passion-based, treating students as the full humans they are, can change the way a community thinks. And we saw that the minute we entered.
No more bandaids
Aiden, and his classmates know that bandaids will no longer work. He has thought deeply about the need to improve community mental health services, while pointing out that won’t be accomplished if “we talk about things once a year” on National Mental Health Day.
The other side
The crises caused by poverty and income inequity were evident in every conversation we had with educators at the University of Kentucky and in the local school. The economic divide that plays out among students and families are barriers to everything professors and teachers are trying to accomplish. The top 1% in Lexington/Fayette County have average incomes close to $900,000 while the bottom 9% make on average about $44,000. Or, to see it another way, the top 1% earn 20 times what the rest of the population earns each year. The disparities in the community get compounded because as a university town, and like almost all university towns, the economic gap mirrors an education gap between those who have a high level of education attainment and those who do not.
Relationships
Relationships and trust are embedded in the ‘every day’ at STEAM Academy. As with all the students we talked to, Aiden expressed love for the faculty, and a deep appreciation for teachers who were able to see the uniqueness of every child, while encouraging the passions and creativity that got them in trouble in traditional middle schools. Those relationships transform kids who usually saw themselves as “not smart” in their previous school experiences.
“Elite success” is something schools either allow, or block
STEAM Academy and other schools across the nation are demonstrating that you don’t need to enroll those kids deemed “gifted” by the usual measures to make an elite school. This school is filled with kids who felt left out of that narrowly defined ‘path to success’ until they walked through these doors. In fact, the STEAM Academy publishes and adheres to a key goal to mirror the demographics of Fayette County and not pull teens from one area or pre-assume who is capable and who is not.
The learning environment
The school respects their passions, their identities, their opinions, and brings out their gifts by connecting kids to their diverse real lives. Aiden, by all the old definitions would be an “at risk” 16-year-old, but in his school he is everything but that. He is proof of what a learner-centered learning environment can do.