New Fulton charter school aims to move students on a path to success
The ride for many students to the Movement School near Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport leads past several closed-off spaces, such as barbed-wire roads and parking lots with high fences.
The school grounds are different. The building is brilliant red. Inside, brightly lit corridors, with names like “Leadership Lane,” “Gratitude Avenue” and “Perseverance Street” offer clear-glass views inside most classrooms. Visual barriers inside Movement School are all but nonexistent.
Barriers are a point of interest for Movement School CEO Kerri-Ann Thomas. She spent a lifetime crossing them after all — the socioeconomic and mental kind — as well as finding ways to help others do the same.
“If you have barriers in your life and you’re coming from a place of poverty, there’s a mindset: ‘I didn’t have this growing up, and because I didn’t have this, that’s what led to this,’ versus an abundance mindset: ‘Yes, I didn’t have this, but here’s where that led me,’” Thomas said.
Thomas talks often about these topics with her students, teachers and staff members at the K-3 public, nonprofit charter school that opened its doors this fall.
“When we talk about the communities we serve (at Movement School) … some people talk about our families in a certain kind of way,” she said. “I tell them, ‘Don’t make excuses and don’t have this limited mindset’ … just because of their economic backgrounds. ”
Of the 200 students at the learning facility, more than 80% qualify for free and reduced meals. They hail predominantly from Clayton and Fulton counties.
The Atlanta location is the newest of the nine Movement Schools, and the first in Georgia. (There are seven in North Carolina and one in South Carolina.) The startup funding came from Movement Mortgage.
Being a brand-new school comes with its own set of challenges. Among them, Thomas said, a lack of historical data to prove the school’s efficacy as a learning institution.
“Whenever a parent signs up, they’re signing up based on a genuine faith and belief that the leaders here are going to do the things they say they’re going to do, because I don’t have data here in Georgia yet to back and support that this is a better option for your child,” Thomas said.
For now, she wants parents to note other kinds of results. For instance: “What is your child when they come home talking about? Are they talking about their behavior or are they talking about, ‘I learned this really cool thing and now I want to do X.’
“When kids are able to walk out of here loving school, passionate about who they are, activism, using their voice, and things of that nature, that’s how I know we’re getting the results we need to get,” she added.
Administrators and teachers are also after another type of result: educating students on the topic of finance.
As a key initiative of the Movement Foundation — the nonprofit arm of national retail mortgage lender, Movement Mortgage — the school’s focus is to equip its scholars with the tools to close generational gaps through, among other things, financial education.
This focus was one of the biggest lures to Movement School for Principal Brandi Meeks.
“It was important for me to find an organization that closely aligned to my values for students, specifically students of color … as well as providing a rigorous curriculum and also providing something different,” Meeks said. “In our case, financial literacy.”
The school encourages financial literacy for students with its curriculum as well as through special projects like entrepreneurship presentations.
“Every single student in this school has to come up with a business plan and articulate it,” Thomas said, adding that the school, through its partnership with Movement Mortgage, offers free financial education courses helping families of the school’s students learn how to build their credit score, how to buy their first home responsibly and more.
The financial literacy angle is one of many aspects that Movement School parent Bri Polk appreciates about the school.
On a recent Friday, Polk’s first grade daughter was among the students who gave an entrepreneurship presentation to her peers.
“It’s not just your basic understanding of how to count money,” Polk said. “They also teach (students) about business sense and business knowledge.”
Just as important as the financial and entrepreneurial piece, said Thomas, is the representation she hopes students will find within the walls of Movement School. A lack of representation was one of the barriers she herself had to overcome.
Thomas spent much of her childhood in poverty in Brooklyn, New York. Yet, she became the first person in her family to attend and graduate from a higher learning institution. She received her bachelor’s degree from Spelman College and her master’s degree in education from Columbia University. Her bio includes work as an educator in Connecticut, New York and North Carolina.
Thomas said it took seeing the power of positive representation to set her on that path.
She found inspiration from college-educated TV characters, like those she saw on “A Different World,” the groundbreaking sitcom that premiered in 1987 about life at a historically Black college. Another inspiring moment was receiving a scholarship from the Shawn Carter Foundation (a nonprofit founded by rap legend Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter to provide educational and financial support) prior to attending Spelman.
“When it comes to our schools I want kids to feel that when they’re reading textbooks, when they’re looking at the teachers in their classrooms … they can see themselves in the people that are here,” Thomas said.
