Catina Taylor wants to restore Kansas City’s hopes and dreams in education with new tiny school

I sat down with Catina Taylor, co-founder of the V Form Alliance and founder of Dreams KC, to hear about her entrepreneurial journey in building a new tiny school in Kansas City.

She said the name came to her around 5 years ago in a dream, and she held onto it.

“I began reflecting upon my own practices as an educator, thinking about many of the conversations I’ve had over the years,” said Taylor. “The constant thing that I kept hearing was we have to educate our own children, and that was coming from urban core parents — generally African American parents who were dissatisfied with both public schools and charter schools, and didn’t necessarily have the luxury of selecting a private school.”

After teaching in district, charter and private schools across the K-12 continuum over the last 17 years, I decided I could no longer accept what was happening to children.

Many of the students and families that Taylor talked to in the community had “lost the ability to hope and dream past their current situation and circumstances.”

“That’s what Dreams is supposed to be,” she realized. “It’s a school, and it’s time to get to work.”

The first step Taylor took toward making this idea into a reality was submitting an application to the Lean Lab Incubator Fellowship. Taylor’s venture was one of five early-stage ideas accepted into the second cohort of the program: Dreams KC, KCoRE, Create By Connect, Bring Us Science, and MentorED. She was able to validate her problem, and get the coaching and connections she needed to get Dreams KC off the ground.

What proved to be the most valuable part of The Incubator Fellowship for Taylor was being pushed outside of her comfort zone.

“The mentors, and of course Katie [Boody] and Carrie [Markel], pushed us hard to get outside of our box, to get outside of what we thought we wanted to do, and what we thought [our venture] would look like. So I think for me, that was probably the biggest challenge — receiving that in-your-face, hard-to-hear-sometimes feedback, and then pivoting in a way in which we needed to do.”

That’s what Dreams is supposed to be. It’s a school, and it’s time to get to work.

One of the pivots Taylor needed to make during the Fellowship was to let go of the commonly held truism about opening new schools in Kansas City: “build it, and they will come.” Instead, she found that understanding her customer’s needs was more important than rushing to open another school building. She spent most of the Fellowship talking to students, parents, and the larger community.

“I really wanted to gain an understanding of what [students] thought they needed, what they had been getting, and what they saw the future of education to be for them.”

Since the Incubator Fellowship, Taylor was accepted into 4.0 School’s Tiny Fellowship program, where she has continued preparing for her first 8-week pilot taking place in March 2017 at the Southeast Community Center, thanks to her partnership with City of Kansas City’s Parks and Recreation Department and Turn the Page KC. Each week, Taylor will test a different key assumption related to the school model and collect data to inform future iterations and ensure that students thrive.

One of those key assumptions is parent engagement, which Taylor acknowledges as an area of opportunity for Kansas City schools overall.

“As part of the enrollment process, I’ll be doing home visits with the parents and crafting a parenting plan. They’re committing to certain things, and we’re committing to certain things. [The commitment] may look different for every single parent that we serve, but I think when you approach it from that perspective, you create buy-in. Parents have a framework of how to hold us accountable and responsible, and then we do as well. That will give us that real data to actually gauge parent engagement, because I don’t think [schools in Kansas City] do it well.”

She says she hopes to partner with KCPS in the future and be a “school within a school” program.

“We could go into one of their underperforming elementary schools, take a section of their kindergarten students and stay with those students, at least through third grade,” says Taylor. Third grade is when students are exposed to standardized testing for the first time. “I have no doubt that our model will work, and those students in the Dreams program will certainly outperform the current model that we have in place…. This could be a turnaround model for the entire system.”

We have to stop embracing something that doesn’t work for the sake of tradition, or saying that, ‘This is the way we’ve always done it.’ That doesn’t matter anymore. If it’s broken, fix it.

So how can we achieve equitable access to excellent education for all students in Kansas City?

“We keep doing the same wrong things a little bit better and expecting amazing results. It just isn’t happening. When I hear someone say, ‘Give us five years, give us ten years’ — our children don’t have that amount of time for us to get it right. We have to stop embracing something that doesn’t work for the sake of tradition…. That doesn’t matter anymore. If it’s broken, fix it. So I am looking forward to having some dialogues about school choice, voucher systems, and things of that nature, and how to strategically work with families and the larger community of how to leverage something that may come about on the front-end versus the back-end.”