I am Lauren Bryant, a Black Southern woman who appreciates a well-planned menu, well-curated experience, and a well-played basketball game. I know the value of team, practice, and the power of the playbook. Schools should inspire the same feeling you get in a large arena surrounded by people wearing your team’s colors. Students and staff deserve those same feelings of belonging when they enter their school buildings, and it starts with the values, systems, and processes observed and implemented by operations teams. As an earthseed cultivator, I believe in the Universal family and that collectively, we have the power to co-create a future where everyone can experience belonging.

I started my school ops career at Ingenuity Prep, a then early stage charter school in Ward 8 of Washington, DC. As a member of the school ops team at Ingenuity Prep, I had that feeling of connection to the team, confidence in the technical requirements of my role, and clarity on where my team was stronger than me. We had our values, our playbook, and our times to practice and perform--clarity on goals and role, who got to lead and flex on different plays. With a commitment to the needs of our community, and by leaning on the strength of relationships, we were able to refine processes like arrival and dismissal or tweak systems, like attendance tracking and truancy supports.

I also had to balance tough conversations across differences where equity and love were not centered, causing a misalignment in my leadership. Though I contributed to the design of morning arrival, I was also responsible for upholding the uniform policy and necessary disciplinary actions for students who were out of compliance. “Compliance” in terms of data is one thing, but compliance of students conforming to a system that doesn’t acknowledge the realities of their communities and homelife, is a completely different scenario. Daily I had to uplift a policy that I did not believe in. I was wearing a cloak of conformity and it was impacting how I was able to show up authentically in my role. 

This dissonant experience compelled me to join the Sustainable Futures team as a founding operations leader. I was an excited and well-equipped operations manager with a clear context of day-to-day operations in a school with developing team management skills. After a few months in the role, I found myself paralyzed by the vast breadth of operational decisions, the requirements of leading a brand new team, the politics of navigating stakeholders both inside and outside of the school building, and the isolation of being the only charter high school to open that year. When I was most supported in my ops role, and when I performed well, I had a sense of confidence and connection not just in my school community but also to other schools in D.C. I experienced what it meant to excitedly deepen relationships with students, families, and staff, and refine practice across the next year. The cognitive dissonance outweighed these moments of belonging. These experiences and many others led me to create StartOps.

Hewlin, P. F. (2009). Wearing the cloak: Antecedents and consequences of creating facades of conformity. Journal of Applied Psychology, 94(3), 727–741. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0015228