A Principal Said Yes

In my  first year teaching, my principal let me go to SCAMLE.

I was a nineteen-year-old math teacher in Sumter, South Carolina and it was 1991. The conference was at the beach, in the same hotel and location where it is still held today. I remember walking into that opening session and thinking, This is exactly where I need to be. I came home energized in a way I had not expected. Not in the way a good lesson plan energizes you, or a strong parent meeting. It was something different. Something that reminded me why I had chosen this profession in the first place..

I went back the next year, and the year after that. By my second or third year teaching, I was presenting.

What I found at that conference, and what I kept going back for, was simple. Most of your professional life is spent inside your school, your district, your own four walls. A conference breaks that open. You sit beside someone from another part of the state who is wrestling with the exact same challenges you are. You hear their frustration and recognize it. You hear what they tried and write it down. You stop feeling like the only one.

If you took the time to attend a conference, you are not a Negative Nelly sitting in the teacher’s lounge. You are there because you care, because you want to grow, and because you want to be better. It puts you in that mindset.

I carried that with me into administration, telling every teacher I led: get out, go learn something, come back changed. I carried it to Winthrop eleven years ago when I came to join the middle-level program. In my first year back at SCAMLE as a professor, I sat in the higher education faculty organization meeting, met Chris Burkett, and learned that the Middle Grades Initiative could help pay for my students to attend.

That mattered to me because I remembered my own college experience. I once went to a conference in Hilton Head with my professors. We went to dinner. We played putt-putt. I remember thinking it was the coolest thing, being around my professors outside of the classroom, to be treated like a future colleague instead of just a student. It changed how I saw myself in this profession.

I wanted to give my students that same experience.

So we started going. The first year, maybe four students. I told them, “We are going to do something fun on Friday night. We are going to go to dinner together. We are going to be around each other in a different way.” I have done it every year since. It is not a small thing.  In many ways, it is the thing. A college student who has never been taken seriously as a professional does not know what that feels like until someone shows them.

Money is always a barrier. A college student cannot easily afford a conference and a hotel room. But if the path is cleared, they go. And once they go, something shifts.

This year, eleven students came with us. Nine of them were attending for the first time. Our program has grown to fifty-four students. Some of that growth comes from the work we do in the classroom. But some of it comes from this conference and the way it shows students that there is an entire community of people who chose middle school on purpose and are glad they did.

What I love most is what happens years later. SCAMLE has become what I can only describe as a Winthrop alumni reunion. Former students who are now in their fourth, fifth, or sixth year of teaching come running up to me. They tell me what is happening in their classrooms, where they have moved, and what they are accomplishing. Some of them went to schools where the principal had never heard of SCAMLE. They went anyway. A few brought their principals the following year.

One of my newer graduates attended a school where the principal had risen through the ranks of high school administration. He was talented and capable, but he did not know the middle-level framework. Then here came my teacher, fresh out of Winthrop, asking why they were not team teaching and why these best practices were not part of the school’s culture. That is what the Middle Grades Initiative planted in her. That is what the conference was about.

The middle grades initiative is helping perpetuate this mindset. It gives teachers the conference experience and a network of people who still believe what they were taught about middle schools.

I also serve as a Schools to Watch evaluator, and what I see when I visit those schools reinforces everything I know about why this matters. Middle school is not elementary school, and it is not high school. It requires its own philosophy, its own structures, its own understanding of what adolescents need at this specific moment in their development. When a school is built around those principles, you feel it the moment you walk in. When it is not, you feel that too.

This year, I watched Alexa Kate Bagwell present at SCAMLE for the first time. She has been coming with us for four years, the only student in our program’s history to attend every single year. Last year, I looked at her and told her it was time to do more. She had been leading, recruiting, and showing up. She was ready to stand at the front of a room and teach other teachers. So she did. That same weekend, she also received the Teacher Candidate to Watch Award. She was running in every direction that Friday, presenting, receiving an award, and leading nine first-time attendees from afar. She handled all of it with confidence.

Watching her, I thought about 1991. A principal who said yes and sent a young teacher to a beach conference. A girl who went to putt-putt with her professors at Hilton Head and thought: I want to do this for my students someday.

They build my world just as much as I help build theirs. They feed my passion. We desperately need many more people who want to be in middle schools.

Thirty-five years later, I am still going to the same conference. Still taking notes. Still taking students to Friday night dinner and watching something shift in how they see themselves.

Still saying yes.