Lizette Valles, founder of Compass Educators and Ellemercito Academy in California, is a former private school teacher. After COVID-19 regulations closed schools, Lizette and her husband, Oscar (also a long-time private school teacher!) founded Compass Educators: A Holistic Tutoring Company to help parents and students deal with distance learning challenges. Their goal was to meet students where they were and equip them to thrive in the new environment. It succeeded so well that some parents asked Lizette to privately homeschool their children.

So, in 2021, they opened Ellemercito Academy a microschool with not only an innovative model but also an innovative space (check out @schoolcommslab on Instagram for pictures). Listen in to learn how Lizette tells their school's story, and how a combination of social media and word-of-mouth help drive enrollment.

The Ferguson School provides students with culturally inclusive instruction designed to foster creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, and love for Christ.

Its curriculum is rooted in the experiences of the global majority to give students more opportunities to see themselves in texts and in history. The goal is to create more meaningful learning for students as they grow in wisdom of Christ and of themselves.

What makes The Ferguson School unique is the partnerships it has with not only families, but other microschools in the area. Continually engaging their communities allows for The Ferguson School to share what's happening in the classroom while ensuring families and partners are key components of its story. Listen to learn more!

When AmTech Career Academy opened in the fall of 2021, in the heart of the pandemic, thousands of students rushed to enroll. The 235,000-square-foot CTE campus is not your average school, though: it features flight simulators, a robot/drone coliseum, an eSports arena, VR simulators for medicine and law and many more cutting-edge learning environments.

So how did the school district get this state-of-the-art school built, and how does it continue to grab national attention in only its second year? 

Relationships that led to partnerships that keep opening more and more doors.

In this episode of the Storytelling for Schools podcast, host Dr. Amanda Holdsworth interviews Jay Barrett, the principal of AmTech Career Academy. He shares the behind-the-scenes story of how his district was able to envision and build what is arguably one of the top career and technical education schools in the country, and how their efforts united the City of Amarillo.

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The Storytelling for Schools podcast is sponsored by the School Comms Lab, a membership community for school leaders around the world focused on support their communications, marketing and enrollment efforts through monthly trainings and support calls and hundreds of templates. Learn more at www.SchoolCommsLab.com. 

Can you imagine learning not only science but technology, engineering, art and math while having fun outside doing something you love?

In this episode, Amanda speaks with Toni and Uli Frallicciardi, co-founders of Surf Skate Science, a non-profit education program in South Florida that teaches hands-on STEAM learning through action sports.

Amanda stumbled across Surf Skate Science on Instagram, and immediately blown away by their visual storytelling on the platform, contacted Toni and Uli to learn more about how their program has taken off. 

Toni and Uli will share how they focus on their target market, leverage relationships and keep their purpose at the heart of their story. Listeners will also gain a better understanding of how students learn through surfing and skateboarding in their program. Does it get more fun than that?

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The Storytelling for Schools podcast is sponsored by the School Comms Lab, a membership community for school leaders around the world focused on communications, marketing and enrollment, and featuring monthly templates, trainings and support calls. Learn more at www.SchoolCommsLab.com. 

In the Storytelling for Schools podcast, we explore how schools around the world are telling their stories. School leaders from a wide variety of educational institutions are sharing their best tips for marketing, enrollment, public relations, communications, social media, websites and, of course, storytelling.

In this episode, host Dr. Amanda Holdsworth gives listeners a brief overview of what to expect in future episodes. Interested in being a guest? Send us your story and we'll be in touch ([email protected]).

Instagram: www.instagram.com/schoolcommslab

On the web: www.schoolcommslab.com