Please Welcome Our New Team Members
The Butler School Welcomes You with Open Arms!
New School Year Jitters
Megahn Dunbar - Math MRT (Coach)
I cannot believe I will be entering lucky teaching year 15! I started teaching at the H.J. Robinson Middle School in Lowell 2008, and switched to working at the Kathryn P. Stoklosa Middle School in 2013.
A fun fact is that I have two amazing children, Ava and Jack! Ava is 7 and will be going into second grade, while Jack is 4 going off to pre-school. Both keep me very busy swimming, tracking on bear hunts, bike riding, coloring, singing and dancing.
My favorite quote is, โA winner never quits and a quitter never wins.โ With my newfound passion for boxing within the past year and a half I feel as though it applies even more, not only to life but also to the sport and continued training.
Some of my other favorite things are trying new things, road trips, time spent with family and friends, music, the color blue, the beach, sea turtles, peanut m&mโs, letโs be real most food, I love working out with my bestie Hong Man, reading and geeking out with numbers!
Jen Hughes - ELA Adjustment Teacher
Coming from: Stoklosa Middle School
1 fun fact: I love horse racing, my family owned a race horse, and going to the Kentucky Derby is on my bucket list.
Favorite quote: "Don't count the days; make the days count." - Mahammad Ali
Favorites: color, food, snack, and drink: Yellow, grape leaves, popcorn, water w/ lemon
Hong Man - 8th Grade ELA
1 fun fact: I am a Board Certified Licensed Aesthetics Educator since 2009. I taught at an adult vocational school for skincare, makeup, and nails before I changed careers. Ask me anything beauty related! I have a love for words and language! My favorite punctuation mark is the semicolor; I love the period just as much and I mostly speak in exclamation points because I am enthusiastic about life! My love for numbers is just as strong. ๐
Favorite Quote: "I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.โ Maya Angelou
Favorite things: are the color yellow, I LOVE sharks, I like to do things in 3 because it is my lucky number, anything corn is my favorite to munch on, my favorite thing to drink is Vietnamese coffee, I love working out with my bestie Meghan Dunbar, and I will always overindulge in buying books!
Christine Thomas - 8th Grade Science
Coming from: Robinson
Fun fact: lived in Lowell my whole life. Went to Lowell Public Schools, including Lowell High and UML
Favorite quote: That which does not kill us makes us stronger
Favorites: Pizza, ice cream, black coffee
Meeting Your Students Where They Are At This Year
Her case study includes the work of Sonja Santelises, the CEO of the Baltimore Public Schools who began her leadership of the very large, and very complex district in 2016. Santelises is a Woman of Color with an extensive background in school and district leadership. She recognized early in her tenure as CEO that, given the history of the district, schools were not going to make progress if their work was not fully integrated with the community, it's people and resources. Cheatham writes, "Santelises worked with her community to design a "Blueprint for Success" or a strategy that better matched it's [the community's] needs and desires. The strategy would focus on supporting students academically, as well as on their wholeness and wellness as human beings, emphasizing the shared leadership to carry out the plan with support of teachers and other caring adults."
The district shifted it's focus to teaching about the city's painful history. For Santelises, the history of Baltimore, Maryland (or BMore), had as much to do with students' academic performance as the trials and challenges they were experiencing present day. Lessons in the history of the city leaned as much on the historic injustices and prejudices that pervaded it's institutions as it did the creative and persistent ingenuity of it's people who rose above various types of systemic oppression to create their own economic opportunity and local success. That, Santelises notes, is because every good and functioning community recognizes it's power and that it's power is, at it's core, dependent upon it's interdependence. Community empowerment raises everyone's agency and investment in shared outcomes--ensuring they are equitable and tailored to specific community needs. Without that, issues of learned helplessness, feelings of divestment and disenfranchisement persist.
This work was also about giving students real and authentic learning experiences in which they were still able to grapple with complex and rich ideas, using modern day dilemmas, presented through lenses that better mirrored those the students' possessed. Santelises writes, "It's the healing found when students engage with a curriculum in which they can see their reflections, their histories, strength and contributions to the collective community and world around them." What students need from us is to hear about the bright futures we envision for them, and about the resources that are available right here, in their city and school, that will help them get them where they want to go. Our charge is to create (and help students see) that classroom and in-school learning is a vehicle for healing, not a reinforcement of their feelings of alienation or invisibility. To equip students with the tools to better analyze, assess and change their circumstances is healing work.
Santelises continues, "We educators must never lose sight of our primary charge: to create caring learning environments and provide students with the tools, skills, knowledge and rich opportunities that will help them envision and manifest the futures they desire... because deep learning, too, is a powerful form of healing." As Santelises suggests, the way to heal students from their past traumas is not to singularly focus on it but rather, "build back enriched, caring learning environments where young people can be more than what has happened to them." The responsibility to help students ascend by focusing on whole child development is not new in education. What is a hindrance, however, is the constant attention we pay to the impact of COVID on student learning. Students are more than the traumas they endured during COVID, or those incurred before or after. When we support whole child development we help students to see more facets of themselves and enriched children, who recognize their own complexity and dynamism, will invariably have more to offer their learning environments--a process which mutually reinforces classroom spaces as made more dynamic and engaging by the students who occupy them.
As we welcome new students this year, let's look for the depth, the contours, the layers. Contrary to the unexamined opinion, Lowell has a heavy artillery of resources at students' disposal. Our school offers many tiers of support for students with a broad range of need. See and recognize every child, tap into resources that a child may need outside of the classroom, but during class time, keep the conversation going around learning, around building students' scholarship, and around their capacities to achieve unimaginable greatness this year.