Before I coached principals, before I taught principals how to lead, I was a teacher of young children with dreams that included being a mother one day. A prescient question I could never put down: where would I find education worthy of my future child?

I spent my first nine years in the classroom teaching three-year-olds through kindergartners in Chicago. I served as the parent teacher at a Chicago Public Schools Child-Parent Center, sitting beside mothers and grandmothers as they learned to read with their babies. I became a reading specialist, then a principal, then a turnaround leader. I knew what a strong school looked like from the inside. And still, decades later, when my husband and I had our first son, a brilliant Black boy with a mind that bridged the gap between symbols, sounds and the spoken word spontaneously as an infant, I could not find the room that fit.

So I built one.

What I learned at Morton first

I had done this once before, at a larger scale. When I became principal of Morton School of Excellence on the West Side, the numbers told a story every West Side principal knows. Children from our community were placed in selective enrollment programs at a fraction of the citywide rate. The children in my building were as capable as any in the city. The gap was not in them. It was in the pipeline: who got tested, who got referred, whose family knew the process existed at all.

We named that out loud with families. Then we fixed the pipeline rather than the children. We opened the first Regional Gifted Center on the West Side of Chicago, changed who was screened and how parents were told, and started holding family workshops on gifted identification. Placements from our school rose by 30 percent. The lesson I carried out of that building is the one I still teach: a disparity is almost always a system wearing a child’s face, and the fix begins with naming the system.

Then Uhuru Shule

Uhuru Shule means “freedom school” in Swahili. I founded it in Bronzeville as a cooperative, parent-led school for gifted Black children, because families kept asking me the same question I had asked myself. The school was small on purpose. Morning meeting, science experiments that spilled into the hallway, field trips where the city was the classroom, and rigor that was never confused with worksheets. We built the curriculum from the research on how children actually flourish and from the long tradition of Black educators who taught that brilliance is a birthright: Carter G. Woodson, Asa Hilliard, Janice Hale.

What surprised me was not that the children thrived. It was how much the parents changed. Mothers and fathers who had walked into schools for years braced for bad news began walking in with a plan, with questions, and with a vision for their child that they could say out loud. That is the part of Uhuru Shule I have never been able to let go of.

What designing my own child’s education taught me

Along the way I was also doing this work at home, as a parent of a gifted Black child, and the lessons from the kitchen table turned out to be the same ones from the principal’s office.

Start with the vision, not the school. Most families begin with a list of schools and work backward. I learned to begin with a question: who do we want this child to be at eighteen, in what he knows, how he carries himself, and what he believes about himself? Every choice after that has something to be measured against.

Capacity is never the question. Investment is. A capable child who is bored is not an unmotivated child. The real question is whether the work in front of him has earned his investment. When I stopped asking “can he” and started asking “why would he,” the plan changed, and so did the child.

Culture is not an add-on to the plan. It is the foundation under it. Our children learn best when they can see themselves in what they study and in the people who teach them. A plan that honors a family’s language, traditions, faith, and history is not a softer plan. It is a stronger one.

Protect the free time. Gifted children are offered everything. The discipline is in saying no. A child with no unstructured hours in the week is a child with no room to become curious on his own, and curiosity is the whole engine.

Nobody should build alone. This is the one I learned last. I had the credentials and the experience, and I still needed other parents who shared my hopes: to compare notes, to steady me before a hard meeting, to remind me what I had said the vision was.

Which is why I am opening the Circle

This fall I am starting the Parent Circle, a monthly gathering on Zoom for parents of children from birth to age 14, including parents of infants and toddlers. We meet one Saturday morning a month from November to June. Each month adds one page to your family’s education plan: your vision, how children grow, how to read a school or a child care setting, milestones from first words through eighth grade, identity and belonging for bright Black children, advocating with teachers, and choosing and applying. You work in the same small group of parents all season, and you leave in June with a one-page family education plan and your own school short list.

We begin with a free Meet and Greet on Monday, November 2 at 7:00 p.m., and our first Circle is Saturday, November 7 at 10:00 a.m.

I built a school because the room my child needed did not exist. The Parent Circle is the room I wish I had found as a parent: other families who believe their children are capable of more than their current setting is asking of them, and a plan to get there. It would be an honor to build alongside you.

Applying to CPS this fall? I am also holding a small Application Decision Clinic on Saturday, October 24, before the November 13 deadline. Details are on the same page.