Highlands School hosted Human Restoration Project, a non-profit aiming to reimagine education, last week to gauge community feedback on education and how we as a society can better aid students, families, and educators.
Chris McNutt, co-founder and executive director, and Nick Covington, creative director, at HRP sat in the Highlands School library surrounded by around 20 community members. Community attendees included Highlands School Vice Principal Alyssa DeBois, Macon County Superintendent Josh Lynch, Macon County Chief Academic Officer Mickey Noe, parents and teachers, The Literacy & Learning Center members, and a fifth grader at Mountain View Intermediate.
First, Covington asked what the community’s fondest hopes are for current school children by the time they are adults. Answers varied, but overall themes remained similar. Attendees hope children retain a sense of curiosity and a love for learning, children have access to a well-rounded education, and they can grow up to be successful, healthy, capable adults. Some attendees said they would like their children to get exposure to alternate career paths and life outside of a small community, like greater diversity.
Gracie Parker, the fifth grader at MVI and member of Why Us Kids?, accompanied by her grandparents, said a greater emphasis needs to be placed on emotional services and counseling.
“I think we should get trauma counselors in every elementary school,” Gracie said. “[For] those kids who can’t receive that help outside of school because of funding or parents not wanting to, have them talk about what’s going on and get the help they need.”
McNutt spoke, saying HRP asks students the same questions for their hopes by the time they’re beginning careers and possibly families. He said children generally have the same responses as the adults want for them. Children want to grow up to be “successful,” which McNutt said is an umbrella term for safety, stability, and good people engaged in their community.
“One of the most interesting things about our work is we find young people actually tend to reflect a lot of similar hopes for the future and who they want to be,” McNutt said. They’ll frame it as being successful. When we ask them what they mean by success, they say they want to be able to take care of themselves, their family, they’re close with people around them, they’re kind, people look to them.”
In terms of education, the community emphasized desires for hands-on, well-rounded curriculum. This includes field trips and learning opportunities and topics like arts and music, which can also be cathartic and instrumental for therapeutic purposes. Attendees praised Adrianne Watts, Highlands School agriculture teacher, for incorporating more hands-on learning in her courses, but some said Watts might not have a lot of opportunities to work with the middle school.
Attendees also discussed more skill-based courses like carpentry and shop. Additionally, they would like to see more local businesses and community partners participating in education. This could look like workshops with the Highlands-Cashiers Land Trust to engage with nature, hearing from local business leaders on how to operate a small business, or experience around machinery were students to head toward construction.
Local partnerships extend beyond the business sector. Lynch said Macon County schools are in an ideal situation to foster collaboration between the various schools.
“I realized my skills were lacking when I had time to sit down with a veteran teacher,” Lynch said. “Yes, we have barriers. We know we have a mountain between us. In this age of communication, there are ways to mitigate that.”
With advances in technology, whether virtual conferencing tools like Zoom or greater connections to the larger world, Lynch said it’s easier to have that dialogue and further prepare students for life away from Highlands School, wherever that leads them.
Community members also said, naturally, that sports are limited in Highlands. Sports can be expensive to start, which is a barrier if teams won’t have the numbers or interest to be sustainable years down the road.
One final trick is keeping students engaged in their academics, whereas school can sometimes feel more like a chore or obligation.
Nationally, education has strides and improvements that could be made, from attracting and retaining qualified teachers to parental involvement in education. Despite areas for improvement, by and large, the community praised Highlands School for their care of the students and preserving the small, personal community characteristics.
“Yes, we are small,” Vice Principal DeBois said, “but we are a mighty school.”