Teresa Stoupas and Annick Charlot

Principal and Single School Culture Coordinator
The Conservatory School, Palm Beach, FL

The Palm Beach County Public Schools is the tenth-largest district in the United States, with 200,000 students and 180 schools about 80 miles north of Miami. Though best known for its wealthiest community, the island of Palm Beach, the district serves a highly diverse county, 36% LatinX, 30% white, 28% Black, with almost 60% of its children considered “economically disadvantaged.”

Huge school systems are notoriously difficult places to effect transformative change. They tend to find themselves with high levels of de facto racial and socio-economic segregation, with deep, intransigent bureaucracies, with top-down leadership structures that tend to say “no,” when new ideas emerge.

When we first met Teresa Stoupas we found someone leading a change movement that was beginning to take root in Palm Beach County. Her pilot, The Conservatory School in the northern part of the county is a K-8 arts infused program for a very diverse student population. It is a beautiful place, filled with children getting to be their own best.

Tere isn’t satisfied with that. After all, there are 179 other schools in the district, and her goal, and the goal of her staff, is to support the liberation of learning through all. We visited on a week where she brought the leaders of other schools looking to transform, as well as district leadership, together to work through what might be.

Developing Each Relationship

Music and the arts at The Conservatory School are not just for those from households that have provided that support, or that are able to provide that support. Instead they are seen as a pathway for learners to discover their own value, and to share that value with their community. “We have one [child] right now who's in sixth grade,” Annick says, “who, and actually Chris Emdin talks about how students, especially boys of color, come to school and sometimes it's not the place where they feel the most confident, so as they go up in grades they are forced into finding identities that may not really be good for them. When he was a fifth grader here he'd come in ready to do just that, you know and posturing and pushing us away, so we noticed him and we thought, okay we know this formula. We put him in music, in the band room with a teacher he could connect with, and over time they developed that relationship with him that did work. Having him be involved with teachers who really saw what he brought to the classroom and the relationships developed participating in music… We think that is a magic thing. Now as a sixth grader he's a totally different kid who works hard academically, who knows that his teachers love him.”

“Really,” Tere adds, “it is not as much as about innovation as it is about kids being seen and kids knowing that they're being  seen as human beings.”

A Safe Space

Palm Beach County, especially the City of West Palm Beach, can be very urban, with all the issues that brings in America. Palm Beach County, especially the western part that edges the Everglades, can be very rural, with all the issues that brings in America. The Children of The Conservatory School come from urban, suburban, and rural communities, and like kids everywhere the issues outside come into the school every morning.

“Our school culture is about creating a safe space,” Tere says, “because that same student, well, we have what we call “Crew” or “Advisory” where boys or girls get together with a teacher each week to talk about things going on in their lives. They meet on Fridays and we had a Friday off and he asked me if we could move the Crew to Thursday because he didn't want to miss out being with that group because he feels like he belongs. “I'm not just trying to fit in anymore,” he told me. 

“Because,” Annick says, “everything else doesn't work unless that factor is there, I think the social-emotional piece tied with the diversity we have on campus really blends nicely. You know campus it's about a third Hispanic, a third African-American, a third white and we have students who live in subsidized housing and students who live in million-dollar homes. That mix on our campus, having students get to know each other on a personal human level, I think helps to develop some empathy and build understanding for those maybe they might not have interacted with in their neighborhoods.” We try, she finishes, to take, “what could be a tricky mix and create something that's more accepting. I've seen that change, that shift, with different students but also with our families who, over the course of the last ten years, you know there has been growth and understanding about how we are a school community. We come from different places and how we must learn to start accepting, to understand each other's stories, and stop being so judgmental about each other’s experiences.”

The Whole Child

“When you see learning come alive for a child because of the vision we have here, that may be very different than other schools,” Tere says, “well I really like to look at trajectories that we've tracked over time with kids, and not only looking at their test score data, but really looking at the whole child as they move through the grade levels. So we have kids that we've looked at... one I'm thinking about right now, went from third grade with below expectation test scores, but then things happened in his timeline. So this particular student started in the music program and his teacher, working on math, taught everything through arts integration. So in watching his progress now that he's left and gone to high school over time and seeing how he's developed academically, but also, with what Annick mentioned, in voice, in being his own advocate. Over the summer between seventh and eighth grade he emailed me advocating to be in high school algebra as an eighth grader. And he really pushed us over because we weren’t sure, but he was declaring that “I'm ready. I can do this.”

The culture of The Conservatory School is built on modeling, what teachers hope kids will do, is what teachers try to do every day. We ask, Tere says,“”can I do better? and then we iterate and do better the next time. We're asking our students to take risks and be brave and do difficult things, and it's gonna be the same for the teachers. If you don't have a space for teachers to take those same risks and be brave, the work is not going to flow forward.”

And The Whole School

“I would say another challenge would be to help others recognize that through our inquiry project-based work that the students aren't perfect,” Tere continues.  “When we have our summer trainings, people have a vision that our kids are all on grade level, that they don't do anything wrong and we need to say, they're real children and  you know that we're all growing , we’re developing children and we’re developing teachers over time. We need to realize that this is a journey. You might see a teacher's classroom across the hall, and it's okay that your room doesn't look like that. Or we find that things aren't working that way so I think they should, and we have to help teachers understand that this is a real place if that makes sense and that we grow in the work with the children as they are growing.”

The outreach Tere, Annick, and the school do is to spread the story of what is possible. “We discover schools in different places in the country that are doing really interesting, challenging, rich work with kids, and a lot of times what we get from people is, ‘well they could do that because of the leader or because of the population of kids or because of whatever it is.’ There's always this ‘yeah but…’ and so we can't do it. So when we talk to people we say, ‘this is not a unique place,’ that this kind of transformation is possible anywhere, with any group of children. That it depends on what their core beliefs are, because that is what centers us.” Tere adds that they, “took a long time developing our mission statement.” That she didn’t bring it with her, that it developed from their work and their conversations. “It was actually three years in before we developed that critical weight of who we are, and what we believed together.”

A Pretty Segregated Society

For Tere, Annick, the teachers, the students, this is not really about school. It’s about our society. “We're a pretty segregated society in terms of where we live. A lot of activities that families participate in are not necessarily with different kinds of families together so that's been something that we really think about here and it's a challenge.”

So the culture they are all building together is the culture they want to see other schools build, to see Palm Beach County build, to see the nation build. Creative, accepting, supportive, humane.