SHARON KEBSCHULL BARRETT: In this clip, Principal Jenny O’Meara explains one way Phillips Middle School in Edgecombe County, North Carolina, worked to create stronger bonds between students and teachers, to be sure that all students felt a place to belong.  

JENNY O’MEARA: We went through this process and we came out with this phrase, and it was just “Phillips is the perfect place to learn and experience love and belonging.”  So like that became our phrase, like I put that everything.  I said it all of the time, I like kept it in my office, love, learn, belonging, like those are the things that we are doing here.  I think we decided to do it because when we listened to kids we just, I mean, no one feels like they belong in middle school, period.  I don’t care how you identify, like you don’t think you belong in middle school.  But also like, I mean, a lot of society messages, in particular black and brown kids that like, they don’t deserve to be loved and that they’re not valued right.  And so, we knew we had some extra work to do I think. And so I think the thing that really helped us do this well during the pandemic was before the pandemic we had created our morning meeting time called Banner and the kids get to choose a teacher they start their day with.  So like we want you to start the day with a teacher you love.  They ranked their teachers, they forced ranked their teachers, and we try to give them one of their top three right.  I mean like, how powerful is…to me like that one design choice is everything because I hated starting my day with a teacher I didn’t like.  I know kids today don’t like that either so like, now I start my day with somebody I really love and who I know loves me and there’s only like ten or twelve other kids in this space with me and we structured it to really try to make that time such that kid felt safety and belonging in the morning because then like, they could use their prefrontal cortex the rest of the day.  And I think that that was huge for us so we ended up, during the pandemic we were able to leverage that time, we call it Banner.  And we were like really able to leverage that time to say like to every teacher, ‘these are your twelve babies, you own them, if you can’t get in touch with them, here’s what you do next.’  Like if these kids are missing a lot of days, here’s where this goes.  And then, the kids they trusted their Banner teachers. And also in banner, like a huge part of Banner is identity, and so we’d been talking about identity for a while and we hadn’t really dived into how do we integrate this into our school as much as we wanted to. And so, we actually spent time in Banner during the pandemic giving kids space to think through how they identify and what that means for them and how they want to create a sense of belonging for themselves in this world.  And I think that, I think it made a big difference.