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The Hangout
# 82 Luci Fowers, Educational Leader and Mentor
Luci Fowers has dedicated her career to education. In this episode, Lucy details her journey from a small town in Utah to her work as a teacher and then charter school pioneer in California. Listen to hear more about Luci’s perspective on establishing strong school communities and much more!
Welcome to the Superintendent's Hangout, where we discuss topics in education, charter schools, life in general, and not necessarily in that order. I'm your host, Dr Sharetta. Come on in and hang out. In this episode, I was privileged to have a conversation with Lucy Fowers. Lucy is a retired school administrator teacher. She's a parent, a world traveler, having served missions on various continents. She is the person singularly responsible for my current leadership role, as she hired me as an untested, very green middle school principal more than 19 years ago, and so I owe a large amount of my current success to Lucy.
Speaker 1:Lucy shares her origin story growing up in a large family in Utah, the role of faith in her life, the role of hard work. It was an honor to speak with Lucy, and I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Welcome, Lucy. Thank you so much for coming on this afternoon. I was wondering if we could start with your origin story, Start at the beginning where you come from, who you are as a person, what your journey has been to get you to this present moment, and then we'll get more specific about some of the questions.
Speaker 2:Well, at my age the journey is quite long. That's okay, we've got all day. I'll start with my young childhood. I grew up in the fourth child of a family of nine children. I grew up in a very large family. Sometimes I think it was the very best thing that could have ever happened to me, and sometimes I think I got a little bit lost somewhere in the mix, right. So my parents were very devout Christians and they followed the path of Mormonism. I grew up in that faith. But I think the thing that I learned most from my parents was a sense of a work ethic In our family.
Speaker 2:Because there were many of us and my father was a blue collar worker we were all expected to work from a very young age. I had my first paying job when I was eight, wow, and I started working at eight years old. My father would take me and my little brother and sister to the cherry orchard at five o'clock in the morning before he went to work, and the cherry orchard was just kind of through the block. It was very near, and I grew up in the little town of Brigham City and so he would pick us each a lug of cherries that we got to be paid for and then he'd go to work and then it would take us the rest of the day because we're little kids to fill another lug, and so by the end of the summer I maybe made $100 in the whole summer of work, but it wasn't $100 I could go buy a new bike with. It was $100 that I buy my own school clothes with, and that was expected throughout our family, that we, from the very young age, began to be self-sufficient on lots of levels.
Speaker 2:There's also this sense of parenting your siblings In a large family. That's very common, where a sibling draws to another sibling and kind of becomes a pseudo parent. And I was a pseudo parent to my little brother, jay, and so it was a really rich life, a really happy life of my siblings. They were all living still, except for one that died of cancer, and we are very, very close and we all in close proximity. We've been doing something in our family for 30 years. We call it cookies and milk. Once a month we get together as siblings with our spouses and bring treats and sit and visit and stay connected to each other's lives. So all of us still very, very close with each other.
Speaker 2:So I was always very much an academic. I loved school, loved it from the time I was tiny and I knew, when I was maybe 10, that I was going to be a teacher. I loved my teachers but I loved the thought of teaching and I pursued that path without a deviation from that time on. By the time I graduated high school, I had a four-year scholarship to attend it was an education scholarship to attend Utah State University to get my bachelor's degree in education. I started out in early childhood education and eventually went on to get a master's degree in curriculum development.
Speaker 2:I married young. I was 20 years old when I married. I was 21 when I had my first child and I was only 33 when I had my last. So I had seven children Very, very rapid pace.
Speaker 2:I think the most important, most impactful experience I had as a young married woman was that I lost my firstborn son to cancer. Firstborn son to cancer. So I was 23 years old when I buried my child. So you isn't it interesting the year, 47 years, almost 50 years the emotion is still there, but it was probably one of the most important experiences of my life because it framed my capacity for compassion, sensitivity to other people, in being an educator on every level, whether it was classroom or administration, is that ability to feel someone else's hurt. And in fact I had a really interesting experience. I'm sure you didn't know about it.
Speaker 2:It was long before you were hired, my very first year as an educator, as a principal, at AE, aea, and we were still at the church church and one of the one of our students little sister was killed in a horrible accident. This little little girl was running across a very busy street with her grandmother and the grandmother cleared the car, but the little girl was hit and killed, and this was a very close community at this time we're talking less than 100 people in the school and so it impacted everyone. It impacted every single person in our school community. But I had lived it. I had lived it. I knew what that mother was feeling, I knew how to talk to her, I knew how to help carry her through months of interface and I'm just a young person, I wasn't really that old at the time and I had lived that, and so I could take that experience and I could. I could carry someone else through it, and so all those things became the foundational underpinnings of the administrator I became. And so here we are 30 years difference from the time I began administrating, from the time my child died, and yet that the impact of that experience was so deep and so important to who I became that it impacted the way I led and, and and I don't suppose many people ever really knew that that was the case that I had lost a child, but uh and, and I didn't lose him in a happy way either. It was just really an aggressive cancer that took him, and so it was a very important part of who I became. Of course, then I continued raising up six children. Although I'm sure successful citizens in the world, I have 17 grandchildren now, and my life is really kind of circles around my family. That's much of what we do. Much of the time we spend is with and for our family.
Speaker 2:I also had a great deal of experience inside of the organization of the church in leadership. I had been a leader in many different organizations inside of the church from the time I was like 23. And I led and organized and motivated people for years and years and years and years, long before I became a school administrator, and so that was part of who I was as well. I understood how to motivate people, how to pull the best of them, the best of what they had in them, to the common cause, and so I had a lot of years of experience in that regard. As this little country girl this little girl grew up in a small town, utah never thought that I would leave the boundaries of my community. And yet my life has been full and rich, because not only did we soon, we lived in New York in our early years, we lived in California for 23 years, and we've also lived in Spain and South Africa in our service at our church and spent many years in other cultures, and that has really enriched my life in just beautiful ways.
Speaker 1:Can you speak a bit about the transition from classroom teacher to if not, the founding administrator at Albert Einstein Academy? Certainly, I always talk about you as the first I have to be careful about my wording. But the first high-functioning administrator of Albert Einstein Academy? We'll leave it that way, right. The rescue administrator Einstein Academies? We'll leave it that way, right. The rescue administrator. You were the Coast Guard at Albert Einstein Academies and if you could talk a little bit about that transition and what AEA was like in early days? We're talking about about 2003,. Right, 20,. Yeah, a long time ago, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, 2003,. I took over the helm. That's an interesting story, and so I'm just going to tell you the true story, and it has some comedy in it.
Speaker 1:Yes, that's great.
Speaker 2:I was a very happy second grade teacher at a school that was a block from my home. I walked to school every morning, had a great community of teachers. It was a well-run school. I loved my job, and keep in mind, though, that I didn't begin teaching until my youngest child was in fourth grade, so I stayed at home 20 years as a full-time mom. I had children of my own. I had my own class of children to raise up, right, so I really, I really value that. I think it's the greatest gift I gave my children, and and I didn't start teaching until I moved to California I moved to California.
Speaker 2:The challenge there was that I did get a master's degree in 2004. No 2000. I think I got my master's in 2000., but at that point I was close to 50. Right Nearly 50 years old, and so I thought you know, there's no way in the world I'll ever be administrator, even though I very much wanted to follow the administrative path. I always knew I had instincts to be a leader, to really organize and motivate people, and so I did not get an administrative master's, I got a curricular development master's and continued with my job. It increased my pay and I figured I'd be a second grade teacher until I retired.
Speaker 2:So one day, two good friends of mine that lived in my church community approached me and asked me if I would teach a communications seminar to the staff of the new school that had just been organized, which was Albert Einstein Academies. And I didn't even know what it was, and so we had long discussions about what the issues were. Well, what's the problem? What kind of seminar would you like me to organize to teach, and what's the brokenness, what's happening inside of the school? And so, of course, they explained the difficulties, and there were many, but one, I think that is primary, is that we had a German educator who was trying to function inside of an American school, and the disconnect between that was so large that it created angst. The other piece was that there was German parents and English parents and they kind of encamped, they pulled apart, and it was the German administrator kind of added to that angst, and so there was huge communication, there was huge division in the school. It was very broken.
Speaker 2:When I arrived, however, I had a conversation with them. I said, yes, I'll be glad to teach seminar for you. I was just known as a good trainer, a teacher, so I began to organize that and about a week later I got a call from Birgit, asked me if I'd be willing to interview as a school administrator. And I said, well, I have no administrative experience and nor do I have an administrative degree. And they said, well, in the charter world back in that day you didn't have to have an administrative degree. And so I interviewed.
Speaker 2:And it was interesting, I didn't really interview, I just interviewed them. I interviewed them. I wanted to know what the school was about and what his issues were. I didn't want to jump into the fire and so I just I'm asking, question after question after question, and I think they never even got through the questions. But, needless to say, I somehow connected to them and within a week I was hired. Now I was offered the position and I think what in the world am I doing? I have no idea how to do this, but I just knew in my gut that I had something to offer and it was undefined. It was undefined at that point. So I finished my year as a second grade teacher and three days later I sat in the office in the little church and it was the first day I was an administrator. I met the new principal or the ex-principal? We spoke only 10 minutes. 15 minutes, no, no real conversation.
Speaker 1:Then she proceeded to go to every teacher that was on the campus and fire them. Oh, before you had a chance to take the reins, yeah, she fired them all.
Speaker 2:That's my first day. I spent the rest of that day going from teacher to teacher to teacher, convincing them that things were going to change and to stay with me and that we would make something happen. And eventually, I think I got kept all but one. And then I had my little staff of five or six at that time and they finished their school year. They all went home and I was sitting there in the office and I remember this very distinctly. I'm sitting in my office and I remember this very distinctly.
Speaker 2:I'm sitting in my office, probably my third day on the job. I'm just sitting there and I'm thinking, hmm, I wonder what principals do. I wonder what I'm supposed to be doing through this summer to make the school year happen next year. So I uh no talk about risk-taking. It was like I jumped off the cliff and I wasn't really even sure I had a parachute, knowing if the parachute would open. But but I had a really strong um, I had a really strong understanding that I couldn't do it. It was way beyond me. Well, first of all, I'm going to turn to my faith, and it was very prayerful and very thoughtful about the way I approached everything. But secondly, I started to say there are people out there that know how to run a good school and how a charter school is funded, how a charter school is accountable. All those people and I started looking for them. So I spent my entire summer. I would spend hours every day in meetings with anyone who would sit with me and teach me. And I just went out and I must have spoken to 25 people that summer trying to understand how finances worked, understand how the charter had to be, the accountability of the charter and the pedagogy of the charter. Understanding how to interview teachers, understanding how to evaluate teachers it was everything. And it was long before a mentor program was in place. I just went looking for people and they would lead me to someone else and they would lead me to someone else. I talked to educators, I talked to experienced charter leaders. I just began to understand not only the vision of what Einstein was, but the vision of what the charter movement was as a whole. So I, but the vision of what the charter movement was as a whole. So I jumped off the cliff and I can't say that my parachute opened right away. It did not.
Speaker 2:It was a tough first year but over time I owned it, I understood it, I knew how to use and manage and motivate people and I really truly believe that I have the experience and the knowledge to bring this little fledgling group. I think my first year I had 10 staff members Pull them together and say look, we're going to make it happen. We can make a difference for kids. Let's talk about how to make that happen.
Speaker 2:And, of course, early, early, early, early on, I really believed in staff retreats, in this process of vision and unification of staff, changing their position from being associates to being colleagues and then eventually to becoming dear friends that had each other's back. I think the definition of where we were going was really, really important to help them, to help me, to define our vision. All those things were very deep and instinctual in me, and so over time I created a great sense of devotion to the cause, loyalty to the school and to me personally, and my parachute opened and eventually I felt blessed, I felt inspired and I knew that I could do it. And so by the second year I had a pretty good handle on where the school was going and what we were going to do. So interesting story.
Speaker 1:It is interesting. You almost got the keys to a building with no staff in it. Yes, before we go on, I just have to say publicly that and I think I said this to you privately when we met previous to this conversation, and I've said it to other people over the years but I wouldn't be where I am today if it weren't for you taking a big chance on me. I was 34 years old, a founding principal for the middle school, so to speak, and so I just, you know, express my gratitude to you for that.
Speaker 2:Thank you, but I have to say I think you sure changed yourself. Clearly, remember, my greatest strength was people instinct.
Speaker 1:I I just had the sense of people, and so I sensed that in you it's interesting, I was telling someone the other day because they asked me how long have you been at einstein said a really long time. And they said how'd you join? How you know, how did you get started? Then I was telling him the process, and so, as we narrowed down and I can't remember how many interviews I had two or three, it seemed like and little did I know Jeanette Vaughn, who was hired at the same time you had the wisdom to pivot from hiring for one role to actually hiring for two, which then was going to guarantee at some point, fiscally, that you would be leaving the organization within a year or two.
Speaker 1:But I remember us being in separate rooms because we weren't supposed to see each other. When one would leave the interview they would have the other one cloistered away and then move them in. And I remember at the time our custodian Norm coming up and giving me a bottle of water and he said if you're hired, remember we need a high school at Einstein, and that was in 2006. And so I always remember that right, that kind of thread. And I was just again early to mid thirties, you know, very green and, and you know, maybe I had some of the innate qualities of leadership, but I had so much to learn and so learn so much from you and and just being there in those very exciting I call them like, it was like startup 2.0, because you went through startup 1.0. And then when I, when I came in and when Jeanette came in, we revitalized the entire organization to get to another level.
Speaker 1:That's right and we and we couldn't have done it without the 1.0 people and and so we did 2.0 and and sometimes now I think back on those days, and it's not a judgment of people who join Einstein now at all, but we have folks who we hire who were born after the charter school law was even enacted in 1992. We have people who don't remember a time that charters didn't exist, and so that means that for them charter schools are part of the fabric of schools. You have public, traditional, you have charter, you have private, and we're kind of all lumped into this, my employer type of a bucket, and so I'm just so grateful that I got to see Einstein in those early days and that'll be something I take with me for the rest of my life.
Speaker 2:So you came in after we had received the facility.
Speaker 1:We came, yeah, so I came in. I remember, I think, going to the campus before I was hired, before I interviewed, and I knew vaguely where it was because I used to kind of visit the Golden Hill neighborhood and the Santos coffee shop at the time. That's no longer there. That was down the street and the neighborhood was very different from what it is today. And then I remembered when Einstein moved from the church to that campus. But yeah, when I was hired you were already, let's see, I think the previous school had moved out.
Speaker 1:So that was actually a year plus months in In right A whole year with them and then a few more months months and then and I was telling someone the other day about remember the, the um electromagnetic frequency on the east side of the campus, emf, the emfs, and we actually had this geiger counter type of a deal yeah, it felt like chernobyl, it. And on hot days and I remember thinking lucy is out of her mind you'd say, come on, let's walk, it's a hot day, we have to go down and check the emf levels. And so we would. We would measure on the east side of the campus near the high capacity power line, and when the emf levels got too high, we had to move all the east side of the campus near the high capacity power line, and when the emf levels got too high, we had to move all the kids out of there.
Speaker 1:And and now I I just think about what would happen today if we had that level of disruption. Right, we'd have, I don't know, social media protests and and who knows, and and back then it was like, ah, this is kind of what you do. You know it's startup mode. You kind of eat cold pizza and you sleep under your desk and you make it happen and exactly.
Speaker 2:That really is how it was. I think that, uh, even before oh well, we're in the church, right, we're, we're exploding we went from a hundred students to 200 students in one year. We had no classrooms. We went from 100 students to 200 students in one year we had no classrooms. It was just a nightmare to try to manage. And no playground and no gym, none of it. So we were trying to get and I don't even remember the name of the school anymore we were trying to get the school up in East County that had the first school shooting, county that had the first school shooting or the county school shooting.
Speaker 1:Cleveland. The Cleveland Book Center is what it had turned into. Well, it was Cleveland Elementary, Cleveland Elementary.
Speaker 2:Okay, it just was sitting there as an empty school. I was desperate for a facility. I mean to the point that I really felt like the school would implode if we did not find a facility. I really think it was just right at the crux of just not being able to continue or keeping it a K-3, you know, because at that point we started as a K-3. Right, so I fought hard for that school, very publicly, a lot of board meetings trying to help people see that it could be a school again. But the committee just couldn't see that it was just too much tragedy there and it never happened, obviously. But I fought and fought and fought and fought and finally was able to chair a campus.
Speaker 2:And you know, one of your questions is what is one of your greatest successes? And actually getting that campus, just as this fledgling administrator that really didn't have a lot of experience, certainly no clout, no evidence of success in the school, none of it. It was just this gritty, hard fight for those kids. And it was gritty, it was ugly. There was a lot of pushback and board meetings diminishing of the German immersion school. That was obviously a school that would not continue and why would we give a campus to a German immersion school that was not going to succeed and all that kind of thing constantly came coming us. And so the day that they granted us a joint occupation of that school was a really great moment in the development of the school, because I knew when I got it that eventually it would be our campus and that all of that difficulty in really being able to educate because of limited facilities went away and there was just this grand hope and great energy when the school got that facility.
Speaker 1:And obtaining facilities. Especially those of us who were raised up in the charter movement know that that's the number one impediment to charter school success is just where you're going to locate, and so, because you fought hard for that, leads us now to where we are today, 20 plus years later, where there's a first phase of a site modernization on that campus that has been completed. There's a brand new multi-purpose room and a dedicated kindergarten. Wing up the hill on the, let's see the southeast corner of the campus across from.
Speaker 2:Benny's. It's where the early childhood, the preschools used to be?
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, and so there's a beautiful vaulted ceiling multi-purpose room and dedicated PE classroom up there, and that's only phase one of multiple phases on that campus. And so we've had this fantastic partnership with the district now for 20 plus years on that site, to where we're using facilities, bonds in collaboration with the district to improve that campus, and it's beautiful. And I think people who enjoy it now and at the risk of them taking it for granted, would be well served by thinking back and understanding that somewhere, a long, long time ago, this very tenacious and also very naive new school principal went down and, you know, grabbed on to the school board member and said we're going to do this. And you know, I remember there was a school board member who I think he was in his last term or second to last term and he helped get the site, and then I think he lost his reelection or something, but it's all of that and it's all in my mind now, but I just at the time, that very aged campus was like the Taj Mahal for us.
Speaker 2:It was just so remarkable. We had a kitchen and we had a gym and we had room for music and we had room for art, and all of it was just beyond what we could have ever, ever, ever imagined would ever happen. And it wasn't just me, it was a whole group of people behind me board members, parents, teachers. We would take a contingency of 50 people to a board meeting. We couldn't be ignored, and it wasn't. It was that.
Speaker 2:It was that early energy that I just love so much. And to just you know, I would get intense when I was addressing the board members, because it was all those children that I'd loved. I'd now loved, that I was aware of, and at that time I knew every child by name, because it was a small school, and every staff member and every parent. It was very intimate, and so to be able to fight for them was highly motivating for me to and then to succeed. I can't even tell you the joy that came for everyone when that happened. So, and of course, you're the, you're the, the blessed person that gets to take that and make it something even more.
Speaker 1:Yeah, can you talk a little bit about something we spoke about previous to hitting record, about your passion for being there at the beginning and startups as opposed to eventually, kind of when the ship writes itself and you're in the day to day and how you've made these decisions in your life to, at a certain point, leave an organization, rather than hang around and succumb to that kind of founder syndrome which sometimes happens right when people get in at the front end, put their blood, sweat and tears in and then ignore the signs that it's time to leave, to the detriment both of, perhaps, their own health but also the organization. Can you talk about what those decisions were like?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I learned both. Well, first of all, let me say this, because I don't think people would know this, that after I left Einstein, the intent was that my husband and I would serve a mission for a church, but it didn't work because his business just wasn't ready to be left, and so I made a decision to accept a position in LA at Goethe International Charter School and I replicated AEA in another county and started another german immersion ib school, and so I took a couple of years there, I did a couple of years there and and so I had these, both of these experiences of startup I mean true gritty, very beginnings of the organization startups and so I found this great satisfaction and perhaps capacity to organize. It's like matter, unorganized, right. It's all of this human resource, all these talents, all these committed parents, these devoted teachers and these risk-taking kids that are going to go to this new strange school, and so taking all of that and directing it, pulling it into focus, pushing it forward, and then standing shoulder to shoulder against all the pushback because there's a lot, especially in German immersion, and there was district pushback, there was community pushback, there was just this idea that this German immersion school wasn't worthy of that neighborhood, but to stand as the focal point and the organizational power behind all that human resource was. I loved it. It fed every part of me, it helped me to hone my skills, to improve my communications, to motivate people on many levels. And then you get about three years in the boat is going right down the path that you had planned for it. Pedagogy is in place, staff has been hired, board members are on board. You created a vision, you pulled the staff into a unified and focused body of professionals that are going to make things happen and you love all these people and they love and they love you and and it's just powerful, very satisfying feeling.
Speaker 2:But early in the third year, maybe the fourth year, we started to see the beginnings of division. There's the different encampments, so there's individuals who want this or they want that, or why aren't we doing things this way, or why haven't we done things that way? How can you possibly let that teacher go, all the things that, all the decisions that you make, and so I started to see the rift and it just it would open, it opened up. And so then I think the thing and I I've used this analogy before you know, under your kitchen sink you have that filter that filters the water that goes into your drinking water tap. Right, it became the filter. So I'm catching. I'm catching all the the muck and discontent from parents, from teachers, from individuals, from board members, from even children, and so you're constantly taking something in pretty dark and very conflicted and then you're filtering it out and you're turning it so it sounds not so bad and you're making it better for the world to see. And that's a constant everyday thing. It doesn't happen in the first three years because everyone's on the same page, everyone's looking in the same direction when the divisions start to come.
Speaker 2:I didn't do so well and I recognized that it was really diminishing me as a person, because I am very much a peacemaker in every part of my soul and so to deal with constant, daily conflict was really diminishing for me. So at that point I realized that I needed someone who could carry it through the day to day, because I had done my part and I was pushing 57, 58 at that point, and so I began to realize that I could not long-term run the school, not just for age purposes, but just my natural tendencies made it very difficult for me to live in conflict, a daily conflict, daily diminishing of who you see yourself as, of who you see yourself as, and always trying to lift and solve and calm the waters. And so I was a startup leader. So I left the school in great hands. I hired David Shoretta and Jeanette Vaughn and I trusted that you would carry on. I think I would stay with you a year, a year and a half.
Speaker 1:Yeah, a little over a year, I think yeah.
Speaker 2:And when I walked, I walked right. I never meddled, ever again. I didn't come back and tell you how to do things. I trusted that you were going to carry it forward. But then I took that same very hard-won knowledge of startup and I transferred it to another school setting another group of parents, another group of incredible people teachers, staff, all of them and started another school Same fights, facilities, hiring good teachers, dealing with discontent or problems with money or whatever it was. And I loved it. I absolutely loved it. And that school I started from literally buying the first books and chairs and desks and hired all the staff and all of that. It was such a startup phase that I actually spent my first year in a Home Depot shed.
Speaker 2:Did you ever know that story?
Speaker 2:There was.
Speaker 2:They gave us a trailer, a portable trailer for the, for the administration, and we shared our school with a junior high in Marina del Rey, and my first two weeks at the school I couldn't have a private conversation because I was sharing this trailer with all the support staff, the attendance clerks and all of that.
Speaker 2:And then I had this little corner where I was supposed to have conversations about things that not everyone should hear, and so I was so frustrated one day that I went down to the Home Depot and I bought a $1,500 shed and I assembled it myself and I put it on the campus and whenever they came to inspect the campus we just locked it. So it looked like a shed, but I lived in it. I lived in it for a year and that was my, that was my startup contribution, and so I finally had this little office. We drilled a hole in the side and plugged a plug in, so I have had power and that's where I spent my first year that startup for you and that's where I spent my first year that startup for you.
Speaker 1:So it's such a fascinating thing to reflect on, because it would be unsustainable for organizations to remain in startup mode indefinitely. It's not. You can't live in that shed forever and it's not a very appealing hiring pitch to tell people they won't have their own office. And uh, you know, yeah, I, I joke, I joke that that um, and I'm not even sure I told you this, but my first paycheck at einstein um as principal, bounced, and this is and it wasn't.
Speaker 1:It was not because of any um or you know, stewardship of funds, but it was because the at the time, uh, the elementary campus, what the elementary school was was an arm of the district charter, kind of like, moving out of that process, and then the middle school had its own LEA and its own CDS code, and the person who was doing the finances at that time hadn't yet figured out the banking piece, and so somehow my paycheck came out of a bank account that had no money in it, and so something along those lines. And so I remember going to the bank, because in those days you would still take your check, you know. And anyway it came back insufficient funds, and I'm thinking what have I?
Speaker 1:done? What have I done? So, anyway, we got past that, but those were kind of the. That's how the early days were. Do you have any advice for leaders like myself or others who are really struggling to preserve some of that early days passion in an organization that is now 20 plus years old and has people who join not because of any ill intent on their part but because they went on indeedcom and found a job at Einstein and hopped on it and it seemed to work for them? I know you're a big culture creator. You've talked about that. What advice do you have for me and for our site leaders and my leadership team to try to reach back into that past and pull some of that passion forward, without ignoring the realities of the present, which are populations totally changed from the time you started.
Speaker 2:We're 10, 15 times larger, larger, multiple campuses and all those constraints you know it comes down to in my mind and remember I haven't lived it. So how, how am I to give you advice? Right? But I think that the, if you distill it all out, the very essence of what those early years were is relationships right and being willing to and investing in the development of relationships. And in the early days it was easy. At a staff of 20 I could do it. Retreat cost me five thousand dollars and I could build that sense of connectedness in very intentional ways. The retreats weren't just fun and games.
Speaker 2:It was a very intentional focus of the staff to what we were up to that we can take down some of the constraints and barriers of the bigness and create relationships, even if they're in sections, so unity of staff in just the junior high or just the elementary school or elements of that, maybe the IB team, high or just the elementary school or elements of that, maybe the ib team. Whatever it is, we can do to build relationships based on the highest good and the highest good of the children, if we can step away from all of the divisiveness that comes from promoting our own agendas.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:And look back to why we're there, look at the kids and look at how we can better their lives and improve their futures. This is all so philosophical. You're probably looking at me like so how do you do that? How do you make that happen? I can't even imagine with the kind of staff and the capacity that you're dealing with now. But it's all about relationships. It's all about people feeling valued, trusted, motivated, accountable all of those elements of feeling like you're an essential part of a team and that that team has got your back. That is the essence of that early, early beginning of a school. Can you retrieve it?
Speaker 1:I have no idea so and I appreciate that and it's actually something I reflect on a lot and about this, the concept of relationship, I remember when we approached the number 150 in terms of staff members and so, and now we're approaching 200, but when we passed the 150 mark it was sometime during covid and I I don't know how I learned of this, but there's a in anthropology, there's this concept of it's called Dunbar's number. It's named after a, an anthropologist who discovered this in in in his research, but he, they, they've determined that hunter, gatherer groups never exceeded 150 individuals, exceeded 150 individuals. And the reason for that, they believe, is that it's very difficult to carry on meaningful relationships with more than 150 people. I'm not talking about social media, because those aren't all meaningful relationships. They're not relationships at all right. They're just someone clicked something and so meaningful in the sense that you recognize someone's face, you might know at least their first name, you'd feel comfortable congratulating them on the birth of their child or you'd know they had a child, all those things, right. It was like 10 times bigger than the size of a nuclear family, approximately, right.
Speaker 1:And I remember when we hit 150 and I was telling our leadership team hey, we need to be careful of this, because we're going to get it's going to stretch beyond people's attachment to the greater organization and what's going to happen is people will attach to something else, productive or not right. It could be the grade level. It could be two or three people who they socialize with. It could be two or three people who like to complain about the same things. Could be two or three people who teach the same content and think another content area is less important. It could be, I mean, and these are all kind of divisions that I think we see now in society I would say that our society is way more divided today than it was when I first met you.
Speaker 2:And student behaviors reflect that that's right In many ways.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:So I think there's one more layer. Like you said, would you be comfortable to congratulate them on the child that you knew they had? My intent in the early years of retreats and investing that minimal money we had at the time on those things, it was even more than that. I was striving to get beyond the sociality of those commonly known things. It was even more than that. I was striving to get beyond the sociality of those commonly known things.
Speaker 2:I was trying, very intentionally, for individuals to know the challenges and burdens that people carried. Because when you know the challenges and burdens that someone else carries, if you are any sort of good human being, you're going to be sensitive to that. They have a bad day, they're having difficulty with a student, and you know their challenges. You are going to become their ally and not their diminisher. And so I was looking to take it even to that level where and and you know the terminology is probably not accurate, but it was from associate to colleague to friend, and I I want I was thinking of the kind of friend that I could tell anything to and I wouldn't be blind, I wouldn't be diminished, I could still be me and share the deepest part of me, and we never quite got there, but we certainly got deeper so that the unification of staff was possible.
Speaker 2:When you have as many as you have and you're saying now nearly 200, how do you do that? How do you do that? And I think that you're going to have to divide it in those manageable groups and build unity in the junior high, and build unity in the high school, and build unity in the elementary school, and not try to do it as a whole. You have to. I would think of them as individual entities and not as only Einstein academies.
Speaker 1:It's really interesting to reflect on that and there's a lot of wisdom in what you say. I think we're in this interesting in-between space where, compared to, let's say, a school district, even a modestly sized school district of, let's say, 10,000 students, right, we're going to be at just under 2,500. So we're significantly smaller, at just under 2,500. So we're significantly smaller. And we still have people who have a memory of the time when Einstein was the Einstein that you described, lucy, which was incredibly intimate, right. And so we have those people who in some ways, I think, mourn the growth and the fact that we're now across multiple sites. They might not mourn some of the benefits that come with getting bigger and some of the financial stability, but they mourn those connection pieces.
Speaker 1:And then you have people coming in who've joined us in the last five years, who they see a fairly big organization and they're kind of expecting the organization to behave the same way that that 10,000 student school district does. Right, with clear policies, hr regulations and blah, blah, blah, all those pieces. And so that's the Einstein struggle slash, conundrum, slash, opportunity is we're between those two. It would be irresponsible to run HR with no policies and regulations and time cards and all those things, but if you could look at what we do today in our organization and compare it to the way Einstein was back on the day your predecessor fired everybody, we're not even on the same planet, and so that's really been the challenge, and it may take another generation of staff and students to move through Einstein. Before Einstein, there's a more common understanding of what the organization stands for in terms of what people expect of the organization. I think there's also a generational difference that's happened from the time you and I met until the present in terms of what people are expecting of their employer.
Speaker 2:Well, even more than that. I think that your teachers now are of an entirely different generation and they see the world differently. They live in the sphere very differently than we, and we're a whole generation apart, and so we could easily manage that difference. But now, if you were to take me and the 20-something teachers year-old teachers you're hiring, now we're talking 50 years, and that is just incomprehensible. How do you do that? Even in my brief tenure as an administrator, I saw the difference in the way that students expected to behave. Not that we expected different from them, but they expected something different, and the culture of the society had told them so.
Speaker 1:It's interesting, as you mentioned, that the behavior, as you know, so many things in education or in life in general are a pendulum right. They swing in one direction. They oftentimes swing too swing in one direction, they oftentimes swing too far in that direction. Then they kind of adjust and correct and move back. We're now in this phase and I think you're going to see it more and more in the next six months or so where in California there'll be a move to ban cell phones on campuses for students right.
Speaker 1:And the governor's come out and said if that bill makes it to my desk, I'm going to sign it. Surgeon General's come out with a big study on the negative impact on the developing brain. You know we all have a range of opinions about cell phone usage, but it's when you and I started. I remember when I got my first smartphone and I think I was in my third year at einstein. Uh, it was unheard of to think that kids would have.
Speaker 2:Oh, unheard of unheard and the social and emotional import of how them having them is beyond anything anyone could have imagined. Just it was incomprehensible that children could be exposed to such negative um input into their lives on on a daily basis, daily basis, daily basis, it's just it's scary and I I hope that and undoubtedly will.
Speaker 1:There'll be a bunch of fights in the public square about this, but my hope is that we get back to a sensible middle ground that we're actually. I think it's healthy that we're talking about the impact of screens on child development and I've talked about on this podcast before. My daughter attended a Waldorf school for her elementary grades and for forever. Waldorf, well, since it was founded a hundred years ago or so, has always had a very restrictive approach to screens and technology in general and it was considered to be the weirdo school for a long time. Right, if you put your kid in a Waldorf school, you were supposed to cover your TV up at home and put it in the closet because your child wasn't even supposed to know it existed, and that seemed kind of a weird extremist perspective, but maybe it was. But there was some wisdom in that right Of limiting the capacity or the access that students had to a very powerful tool.
Speaker 2:But powerful in many ways. Many ways good and bad, and to the bad and to the bad. That brings to mind a story. One of my very first jobs, beyond being a mother, was I managed a 250-student childcare facility because I had a degree in early childhood. I managed it for several years and one of the things that this school promoted was access to Reader Rabbit, which was the early, early early reading programs for the young children, and they sold this and it was a franchise. They sold this franchise idea that that was going to benefit the children, and so what they were doing is they were pushing the children very vertically, very fast into reading.
Speaker 2:But a three year old doesn't need that. A three yearold needs exposure to many different experiences laterally, and so I would fight all the time the franchising entity to say I don't think this is good for three-year-olds, we don't need to have them on the computers. And so it was even back then and that was 30, 40 years ago, probably 40 years ago that was where it began is pushing children into academia, when what they did, what they really needed, was life experiences. You know, it was that difference.
Speaker 1:And then when we looking at where schools are now in California with universal transitional kindergarten, right where we all now have UTK, and I'm happy to say that there's a big emphasis on play-based UTK At Einstein, it's largely play-based, as it needs to be. As it needs to be, and some people would argue that kindergarten should be much more academic. Well, at least a recognition of you know things like kids needing nap time and those sorts of things that I I know that that still happens at einstein. I think that's really healthy, um, but we've we have this push to make our kids grow up so quickly like they're gonna that if we learn, if they learn to read when they're four, it's going to help them when they're 40 in their engineering job and um, so it's it shows that that's not the case.
Speaker 2:They'll make. They're gonna make up the difference in a year or two and that's right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's, that's um. You've been exceedingly generous with your time, and so I just have a couple more questions for you, lucy. The first is reflecting on your journey, your life's journey. What advice would your current age self give your 18 year old self, and why?
Speaker 2:Wow, here I am at 70 plus, and I thought quite a lot about this. What would I tell myself at 18? At 18, I was a very tenacious, very determined learner. I loved the university setting, I loved college and I was very much a perfectionist. I expected a great deal of myself and I think that if I were to give advice to myself, I would probably say, as my children used to say, mom, just take a chill pill, just relax. That was the chill pill, and I think that I would advise myself to not take things so so seriously, to truly enjoy the journey, to not take things so so seriously, to truly enjoy the journey.
Speaker 2:I think that I was so intense as a personality, as a mom, as an educator, even as an administrator, was that I was seeking the highest level that I could accomplish, but I wasn't enjoying the moment.
Speaker 2:A lot of times now, when I'm with my grandchildren, I consider the thought of am I present? Am I more worried about what I'm going to make them for dinner, or am I more worried about sitting next to them with them in my lap and reading them a story or playing a game? And I still have to fight that I work hard to be present to just enjoy this moment at this time and don't worry what's coming in the next hour or the next day, and so I think I would say that I think I advise myself to walk with unquestionable integrity. I never had to look over my shoulder to wonder if someone was going to find out about something that I had done, and I think that I would advise myself to do that. One of the sweet stories I had in my Guta experience was we were one half student off in qualifying to get the additional funding that we used to get for 20 student classrooms 20 to one yeah.
Speaker 2:And we were 20.395 or something and I was in a board meeting and they were pressing me to make that a 20 so that we could get that additional funding. In whatever way I could do it and of course there would be many ways you could make that happen right, if you chose to do so and I adamantly refused. I will not do that. I will not cook the books so that we can get that extra funding. I don't ever want to have to look over my shoulder to find out if someone's going to find out something that I did that was unethical and stood my ground, and of course it went away and I never did do that.
Speaker 2:But I think that that sense of safety, a sense of wholeness that comes from personal integrity, is very important to me and I would advise myself to continue that path.
Speaker 2:I think the other piece was take time to care about the people in your circle, whatever that circle may be. I mean, really care about them, serve them in whatever way you can serve them, lift them in whatever way you can lift them, make certain that when they're in your space they feel safe, they feel valued, they feel loved, and I think that in the drive to be an achiever, to be a perfectionist. I would sometimes leave people in my wake because I didn't take the time to bring them with me. I was driving, I was going forward and oftentimes I'd have a whole crowd with me, but there's always that one or two that seemed to get left behind and I didn't stop and go back and take their hand and bring them up. And I think that that I would advise myself to always care for the people in your sphere, no matter who they are, whatever difficulties they may face does your woodworking?
Speaker 1:you haven't spoken about your woodworking, but does the woodworking help with the first piece of advice that you spoke about, which is reminding to be in the present, because I'd imagine, if your mind wanders, you're either going to mess up your project or you might get injured.
Speaker 2:It was actually very therapeutic. I did word working all the way through my career. The many beautiful things. I just finished a second tiny house.
Speaker 2:I find it so satisfying for many reasons.
Speaker 2:First of all, I have an engineering brain, beyond being a very people person, and so my engineering brain gets fulfilled and calmed when I'm trying to configure how to build something, the engineering piece of it, how to build something, you know the engineering piece of it.
Speaker 2:So it completely takes away stress or worry about other things because my brain gets fully engaged in the engineering of the process. Second of all, just to not have noise, to be in that quiet space by myself where I am sanding a piece of wood or smelling the smell of pine or whatever it is I'm engaged with at that time, was very, very therapeutic for me through all the years. And when things would be really stressed, my husband always knew because I would head to the woodshop, because that would unwind me, it would calm my, and then the satisfaction of seeing the production of something you've actually physically made is extremely satisfying to have concrete evidence of of what you're able to create in your own mind and I love that. So I still do it. I've been. I've been woodworker probably 45 years now, long, long time.
Speaker 1:so yeah, I have one more question for you, but before we get there, are there any other topics that we haven't mentioned? That you'd like to touch on? Anything that is rattling around in your head, that you thought I want to touch on, this that I I kind of might have interrupted you on, or anything that has just occurred to you?
Speaker 2:or anything that has just occurred to you. No, I think we've really gotten to the essence of a lot of who I am, what I think and how I invested my energy and my passion into the beginnings of the school.
Speaker 1:Well, I have very much appreciated the opportunity to chat with you because we're also preparing for the 25th anniversary of Einstein, which will be in 2027. It seems like a ways off, but before we know it it'll be here, and so this is a little bit like a time capsule too. That's not why I invited you to be on here, but as I'm watching and listening, I'm thinking this is perfect. We need to preserve this. This is living history, so I really have appreciated that. Last question you have the opportunity to design a billboard for the side of the freeway closest to your home. I don't know if that's Route 70 or something, I-15 probably. What's that? I-15. I-15. So the side of the I-15, Lucy Fowers gets to design a billboard that expresses her values, her value system, her message to the world. What's important? What does your billboard say?
Speaker 2:I think it would definitely be people-centered. I think my billboard would say stop, take time and really enjoy and care for the people in your world. I think that this world is getting noisier, busier, much more distractible than it has ever been, and I think that we are losing relationships. So I think that my billboard would say you know and it's something that we actually have billboards about have you taken time to hug your child today? Have you taken time to tell your sweetheart that you love them? Have you served them in some way that validates them? You know it's. It's that that's the core of who I am.
Speaker 2:And, of course, you know that I serve missions for the church, both in south africa and spain and actually in vista, california recently, and it comes down to finding the need and filling the need. That's what it is and we do that. We did that for you. We've now served for six or seven years as missionaries and it's that is. You find this needy person. Sometimes it's a physical need, sometimes it's a spiritual need, sometimes it's just a social disconnect, whatever it is, and as an individual, your calling and in my case I consider it a calling your job as a person, is to fill the need, but you can't fill a need you can't see, and so you must be aware of all those people in your world and you need to see the need people in your world and you need to see the need and feel the need Well.
Speaker 1:Thank you, lucy, so very much for your time and your wisdom and your friendship and your inspiration again for taking a chance on a very green administrator and it's made a huge, it's made all the difference in my life, so I really appreciate it and appreciate having you on today.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you, it's been a privilege. Thank you very much.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to the Superintendent's Hangout. You can follow me on Twitter at DVS1970. Please be sure to share this show with friends and family on social media and in the real world. Thank you to Brad Backeal for editing and production assistance and to Tina Royster for scheduling and logistics. Thanks for hanging out and have a great day.