Ms. Curry has been a science teacher and associate school director before becoming our school director. She has taken over for Mr. White as school director. This year, Ms. Curry is will be starting a few programs to improve our school and community for years to come. I asked her a few questions compiled from some students.
How will you be handling school issues addressing...
School pride?
This year we are trying to tackle this in a few ways. The two major approaches are:
1. Allowing students to wear Byers spirit wear every day of the week (instead of just on Fridays). We feel strongly that to create a sense of pride in our school we should be allowed to represent our school at all times via our attire.
2. We are digging deep into our student leadership through our Student Government structures to ensure that student voice guides the work that we are doing, increasing student involvement and pride in our school.
School culture?
The major initiative around school culture is our work with Critical Incidents. This is part of a bigger-picture vision that we’ve set around our culture that focuses on the idea that we should have our culture leaders (i.e. Deans and Associate School Directors) spending their time on enforcing behavior and systems that truly affect student sense of belonging and identity vs. ‘school rules’. We modified dress code, cell phone & headphone policies to create what we believe are more reasonable, enforceable policies that hopefully lower the time spent on these issues (which are pretty surface-level) and allow us to dig into the Critical Incident and other work that addresses deeper social and personal development of our community.
Mental health and mental health support?
I want to make it clear that we very much value and understand the importance of baseline student mental health as it affects students’ ability to engage in school and achieve academic outcomes. At the same time we are, at our foundation, responsible for providing a Free and Appropriate Public Education (FAPE) by Federal mandate and this is measured by and focused on academic outcomes only. With limited funding in our State (we receive more than $2000 less per student than the national average) and increases in funding for education that have not kept up with inflation for the past 10 years, we really do stretch every dollar just to provide strong classroom instruction to reasonably-sized groups of students. There are other social, State- and Federally-funded institutions whose mandate and missions are directly related to providing mental health services and one of our priorities this year is to be more clear about what those institutions are and how members of our community can access them.
We are starting a Mental Health Advocacy group as part of our Wednesday Community Impact Teams (you’ll know more about this soon) which we hope can help create capacity for us to do this and other work like it this year. Additionally, we did make staffing decisions this year to hire a third Social Worker onto our team (instead of additional teachers or other administrative support staff). This adds an additional mental health staff member to our core model and has created a true mental health team on our campus lead by Mrs. Morris-Hobbs.
We are also beginning social-emotional circles in 6th grade this year as a Network pilot and hope to have this structure build 6-12 long-terms. These circles are built based on the model of a sister school that built their own model after the DSST Academic Model and added in an amazing vision for also creating strong social-emotional support. So far these have been great and we’re excited to hopefully expand to 7th grade as well next year.
What is your job now as school director; and how is that different from your duties in transition last year as well as your previous positions in DSST and DPS?
I am honestly not 100% sure what my job is as School Director yet :) It is definitely different from being solely instructionally focused as our Associate School Director and has had some differences from my time in transition last year. Ultimately, I am finding that I am needing to be much more responsive to urgent parent and student concerns than in the past (Mr. White did a lot of this) and am needing to fully delegate some of the larger systems and team leadership that I previously took on. This is both invigorating and challenging.
There are many parts of my former job that I received accolades for in the past that I no longer have a direct hand in. While it is hard to let go of those pieces of my work, I hope to grow into the new roles I’ve taken on and find success in those too! I have an AMAZING team around me and am very fortunate to be able to confidently delegate tasks, teams, and systems knowing that my team will uphold a high bar and ask for help when they need it. Prior to coming to Byers I founded a turn-around 6-12 campus and an alternative high school as a Founding Science Teacher. This job is very different from that and I hope that I am much better at it (:
What do you do in your free time?
I spend most of my ‘free’ time with my 3 year old and 6 month old daughters. In the (extremely) rare moments when I am actually by myself for more than 10 minutes I generally take a nap (not kidding). In a life where I have actual free time without responsibility for little people (I’m hoping this is one day a thing again) or catching up on work I love to garden, go on runs, and read fantasy novels (preferably series).
How do you feel about archery?
I am significantly less enthusiastic about this than Mr. White. But I don’t hate it. And I’m probably not that much worse at it than he is ;).
Would you like to introduce your family?
My husband’s name is Kevin. He is a trained Pharmacist and currently works doing data analytics for Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield to help ensure that their patient care and healthcare systems are efficient and effective. I have two daughters- Jane (3) and Ruth (6 months) who are really wonderful. Jane is HILARIOUS, she loves to swim and imitate me (she has started telling me about all of the ‘important’ meetings she has with her stuffed animals) and is so, so skinny (she weighs 25 pounds, which becomes more meaningful when you know that Ruth weighs 17). Ruth is a wonderful, fat little baby who is almost always happy and smiles with her tongue sticking out. She loves to eat and refuses to attempt independent movement, including sitting up on her own, which I truly think is because she is just happy to hang out. But she can’t communicate at all yet so who knows. I have a younger brother who is a Civil Engineer and my parents are both retired although my mom does grant-writing part time.