[00:00:00] Jess Alfreds: The kids that were really struggling academically, by and large, almost always, truly. It was part of something deeper. When we started to tackle that as a really important key piece, we found that when we did deal with those emotions, it was an immediate effect on academics.

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[00:00:29] Gretchen Roe: Hello, everyone. Welcome to this recording of the Demme Learning Show. We are practicing what we call here at Demme Learning, Semper Gumby. In other words, always flexible. My wonderful guest, Jess Alfreds, has a situation today. Isn’t that what happens to us when we homeschool? We become the masters of flexing in a situation. We are recording this session early so that you all can have the information, because what Jess has to tell you is so vital and so amazing. We get to do it in her classroom. If you’re looking at the screen and going, “Wait a minute, is this lady outside?” Yes, she is indeed.

I’m going to let Jess introduce herself and tell you about Carolina Kids Co-Op. Then we’ll give a little history of how we got to this conversation about emotional intelligence that’s going to be so valuable. Jess, please introduce yourself.

[00:01:30] Jess: Hello. My name is Jess Alfreds. I am the founder and director of Carolina Kids Co-Op, which is an outdoor academic program. We have 15 different locations all throughout the South. I’m at our flagship location today in Myrtle Beach. This is where we do all the things. We are outside in the park, which is where I spend most of my time. Thank you for putting up with any noise and distractions that may happen behind me.

[00:02:02] Gretchen: You know what, Jess? I’ve done this recording in all kinds of environments. This is a unique one, but I think it’s going to be really a lot of fun. I’m really looking forward to our conversation. You were a guest on the show last fall with me because I wanted to learn how you could teach outdoors every day. That recording will be included in the show notes of this conversation because I think it’s sort of a springboard to understand.

In the course of that conversation, you mentioned that it’s more important for you to meet the emotional needs of the kids in your cohort than it is to meet the academic needs. One follows easily behind the other. At the time, I asked you to tell me more. Here we are today. This is going to be a tell-me-more conversation. Tell me how you all came to the realization that meeting the kids’ needs emotionally would help them academically.

[00:03:08] Jess: I’m a social worker. I started out as a social worker. I was a foster care social worker for 20 years before I opened a home school.

[00:03:17] Gretchen: I don’t think I knew that about you. That’s awesome.

[00:03:19] Jess: I’m coming from that perspective. I don’t think I was fully conscious of how important that was going to be, although it seems obvious in hindsight, but how important that was going to be in running a home school co-op, multiple home school co-ops. I currently have about a thousand kids in Carolina Kids Co-Op. Lots of different kids coming from different backgrounds. It was very clear to us from the very beginning that for kids who are struggling academically, the first line of defense is absolutely figuring out, is the struggle really academic, or is there something else going on? Is there something deeper that is causing frustration, that’s causing a lack of confidence, and all of those things?

When it clicked, and we saw the kids that were really struggling academically, by and large, almost always, truly, it was part of something deeper. When we started to tackle that as a really important key piece, we found that when we did deal with those emotions, it was an immediate effect on academics.

[00:04:42] Gretchen: In that process, though, it’s a fine line between providing emotional support and putting yourself in a situation where you’re really stepping beyond the role of providing academics and providing something else. Where do you draw the lines?

[00:05:05] Jess: We’re still, I would say, five years in. I think that’s a case-by-case basis. We absolutely are providing more than academics. I think that is what makes Carolina Kids Co-Op so different. Most people would say, “What’s different about CKC?” It’s that we’re doing outdoors. We are leading the outdoor education movement. We have all of these different locations. They’re all outside. Our kids are doing math and science and social studies, and chemistry lab, and all the things outdoors.

That’s on the surface what looks really different about us. I think when you dig deeper, it really is our approach to holistic education and making sure that we are really seeing the whole child. There are lots of times where a child might not go to math today because something happened at home. They come in upset. They really need a one-on-one with somebody, with one of our emotional support members of our staff. That’s just the priority at that moment. We absolutely are here to deal with the emotional issues as well. I do think that that is one of my criticisms of traditional school or even other academic programs.

If you just focus on the academics, if you take that narrow view of the students, it really leaves a big hole there, and you’re chasing your tail. Why is the child not learning division? I’m going to try division 18 different ways, and the child’s still not learning division, and I’m getting really frustrated. There’s another layer. It’s like we’re seeing the– The not learning division is the iceberg that’s sticking out from the ocean. We’ve got to look underneath that iceberg to say, “Is this really just math is hard for this student, or is there a lot more going on?” We definitely feel like it is part of our job to deal with the ‘a lot more going on’ as well.

[00:07:00] Gretchen: I wonder if you could speak to– At 18 homeschool conferences a year, I talk with parents all the time who’ll say, “Well, he just doesn’t want to apply himself. He’s lazy.” My rejoinder to those parents always is there’s no such thing as a lazy child. There’s an impediment to their ability to learn, and it’s up to you to find that. How do you all deal– I’m sure with over a thousand kids under co-op tutelage that you find parents who see things that way. How do you handle that?

[00:07:38] Jess: We try to gently involve the parents. It’s difficult. It’s a lot easier to say to a student, “This is where I think you’re missing the pieces, and this is what I need you to do.” Sometimes, part of what we do here at CKC is sometimes we bring in the whole family, and we say, “Your child’s struggling in math, but we know this is not a math issue. Can we help with the holistic picture at home?” 99% of the time, families take us up on that. They know that myself and multiple other members here at CKC are coming from a social work background. Usually, they welcome that. Every once in a while, they say, “No, thank you,” and then that’s it. We don’t push.

I completely agree that there is no such thing as a lazy child. There’s no student that wants to be constantly nagged or bugged or to have this negative persona put on them. There are definitely students who are not motivated, who are not being challenged, and who are not being offered a program that excites them. There is something that will get every single person jumping out of bed in the morning. Even those who are not morning people, I am completely sure of that.

The way that we try to look at it here is that it’s our job to figure out what’s your thing. If we haven’t found it yet, it’s there, it exists. A lot of parents will say, “Well, yes, it’s video games. That’s what’s going to get them to–” Okay, well, then we’re going to figure out how to make that part of the academic, the full academic picture, because the key is getting them jumping out of bed, excited about their day. Taking ownership of their life and their day, and then we’ll fit in all the stuff that is “boring” and that they’re not interested in.

[00:09:32] Gretchen: You told me back when we spoke in the fall that you all actually have class management time to teach kids the art of empathy, to teach kids how to listen to each other. You even said, “I know when it’s working, when I hear them saying to each other what we have taught them.” Can you outline that for us again? Because this is so wildly valuable. I get parents who will say, “Oh, my children fight all the time.” I think, “Mmh, here’s a perfect opportunity for you to figure out the language that you all use with your students to be able to help kids negotiate their way through their academics emotionally in a successful way.”

[00:10:25] Jess: Right. Absolutely. Yes. Every student at CKC is required to take an emotional skills class. We offer a CKC diploma to graduate from our program, and you cannot graduate without your emotional skills credits. It’s a very integral part of our program. Some examples are this semester, our third and fourth graders take a class called “Friendship Workshop”. Our little bit younger kids take something called “Personality Project”. Older kids are taking “Stress and Anxiety Management”. Our middle schoolers take a class called “Uniquely Me”.

I love that class so much. It talks a lot about the masking that goes on with our middle school kids and the trying to camouflage yourself and fit in and losing that spark, which we see happen in those middle school years of what makes you interesting and weird and unique. Weird is a very positive word here at CKC. Each age group has a different emotional skills class. Our little, little guys take a class called “Conflict Resolution”. Our four to six-year-olds. How do we share? You have my crayon. It’s my crayon. It’s your crayon. All that stuff. We start from four to six years old with that class. It really helps kids hold on to who they are in those tough pre-teen years, where everybody just wants to fit in.

That losing of yourself is where we start to see kids really struggle, start to develop personality traits that can be called lazy. We find that if we can start really early and require those emotional skills classes– We also offer one for the adults, a master class in emotional regulation. We truly are trying to take a holistic picture. We really believe that if you don’t look at the family structure and you don’t offer programming to the parents or grandparents or whoever’s in the home, then we can do a lot of great work here. If we’re sending you back home to a house where we’re not working on emotional regulation, we don’t make huge progress. When we get the whole team involved, that’s when we see real transformation.

[00:12:49] Gretchen: That’s really amazing. What I remember you saying back last fall is you’re starting with kids at ages four to six years old. A lot of times in a parental environment, we’re thinking that we’re really corralling them at that age. Sort of keeping them from hurting themselves. What you’re really doing is you’re stretching them to begin to know themselves and to begin to observe those around them. How long are these sessions when you do these? Because you all are together four or five days a week, right?

[00:13:28] Jess: From 10:00 to 3:00. Most kids are here either three or four days a week from 10:00 to 3:00. Each of our class periods is either 45 or 50 minutes long, even the four-year-olds. Now, they are not sitting and doing any sort of sit-down and be quiet and listen to me for 45 minutes. That is not happening. We do start to try to expect. Expectation is a lot of what we do here. We explain our expectation. We tell them that we expect certain things of them because we absolutely know they can achieve them.

A four-year-old, we’re going to set an expectation of sitting and listening for four minutes. We’re going to do that. Then we’re going to get up, and we’re going to play freeze tag, and we’re going to play Red Light, Green Light. We’re going to do art projects, and we’re going to do music. Then we’re going to sit down for another four minutes, and we’re going to practice. We might give an assignment where we might talk about sharing, which is huge with our four to six community. What can we do if a friend has taken a toy that we really wanted to play with, and those sorts of things?

We’re going to sit there for four or five minutes. We’re going to talk about it. We’re going to let the kids share. They are so much more capable at four and five and six-year-old than our society has deemed them. Then we’re going to sit. We’re going to talk about the things they want to share. “Last week, my brother, he always does this.” “Okay, what can you do next time? How can we–” What we do a lot of in the four to six group is role play. “Let’s pretend you’re at home and your brother has come in, and you’re playing with your favorite toy, et cetera.”

We are working really hard for that 45, 50 minutes, even though they’re up, they’re doing role play. What I’ve learned running a co-op is that kids of absolutely every age love role play. From my 4-year-olds to my 16-year-olds, if I say, let’s work this out, whether it’s the Civil War or sharing a crayon, role play is a huge part of what we do here. It works really well with building the emotional skills. We really put them in that moment. “Well, my mom makes me do this, and it makes me angry, and then I react like this.” Okay, well, let’s practice that. Let’s practice it again and again and again. Then when it comes up in real life, you’re going to have a better reaction. You’re going to know what to do.

[00:15:52] Gretchen: Sure. I love the fact that you’re having them anticipate how to respond. It’s not reactionary, but it’s planned. That’s enormous. These kids are with you three to four days a week from 10:00 to 3:00, and you’re accomplishing this, and you’re accomplishing the academic piece as well. I think that’s something that is probably a little mind-blowing to parents who look at a traditional academic experience 8:00 to 3:00, and how do you have time? You gave me a clue to this last fall when we spoke. Can you speak in a little bit more depth of how you get that time?

[00:16:37] Jess: Yes. We’re just very intentional with our time. Our kids are getting– They have four or five, depending on the age and the day, four or five classes a day, four days a week. Each child has at least 4 classes a day, so 16 classes a week. We are really intentional about what those are. We’re going to get in math. We do math every single day, and we do language arts every single day. Then, buffering from there, we’re going to make sure that we’re including high-level, rigorous science, social studies, geography, handwriting, emotional skills, art, music, physical fitness.

We try to make it as fun, as engaging. These kids show up early to school every day. Right now, what I’m looking at, my vision right now, is my forensic science class. My teenagers are in forensic science. This week, we had the North Myrtle Beach canine police come and talk to our kids about how canines are helpful in forensics and in criminal investigations. They’re out in this beautiful field right now. They are out with the canine, little adorable dogs. Serious, but adorable. The police officers right now, and so they are up. They’re standing up. They’re moving around. They’re asking questions. They’re learning this incredible information.

It’s a lot of Jenga. There’s a lot of moving pieces. There’s a lot of trying to fit in. It’s more Tetris. It’s more Tetris than Jenga. It’s like, “How am I going to make sure that each kid is getting each of these amazing classes?” We do it. We get it done. We try not to waste a lot of time. It all fits in. I think there is a misconception about the time, too, because in public school or traditional school, there’s a lot of time wasted. In my opinion, wasted. I don’t want to put a judgment there.

Lining up, waiting for students who are not at the same level but in the same classroom, there’s a lot of waiting. You’ll find that when you eliminate all of that waiting, when you put kids on the same academic level in the same classes, and when you don’t worry about lining up to walk to the cafeteria or lining up to whatever, you save hours. You actually save hours in your day. We get it all done.

[00:19:12] Gretchen: Another thing that you said, and I can’t remember whether this was when we first met in Florida a year ago or whether it was when we had our conversation last fall, you said that you find that modeling how to speak to each other and how to respond, you see that come back, and the kids will actually check each other. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

[00:19:39] Jess: Absolutely. Our team here at CKC is absolutely the best on the entire planet. Not at all biased. That’s just a fact. We are the closest of friends in the classroom as well as in our real lives. This is who we’re spending our off time with, we are always together, which means we are always working. We go out to dinner on a Sunday, we’re talking about our kids and how to improve things, and how to make co-op even better. The way that we treat each other with so much love and respect is definitely mirrored in our students.

I absolutely see when I look at other programs that there is a way that sometimes the higher-ups speak to their teachers or admin speaks to classroom teachers that can be disrespectful, that can be a hierarchy of sort of you work for me type of attitude that the kids see and hear and sense. We are the complete opposite of that. We are a team. We treat each other respectfully. We’re coming in, and everybody’s hugging and supporting each other. We absolutely are modeling our behavior, the way that we speak to each other, the way that we speak to them.

We had an incident once where there was a teacher that we had hired that was new and wasn’t really meshing well with the vibe of what we’re trying to do here. My students, I was so proud. Some of my teenagers came and said, “Mrs. A, we need to let you know something. We’re not too crazy about this teacher.” I said, “Okay, well, some students don’t like all teachers. What’s going on?” They said, “The teacher is speaking to us in a way that you would not allow. You would not want anybody speaking to us the way that person is speaking to us.”

They had my full attention at that point because I’ve taught them that they are my treasures and they are valuable. There’s no reason that at any time anybody should speak to them disrespectfully. Authoritatively, absolutely. Sometimes you’re told what to do, and you just need to do it. Absolutely. There is a respectful way to have every conversation, even the tough ones. They really get it, and they really watch us. They are always watching us, as we all know, even just as parents. They’ve absorbed it, and they speak to each other. When they don’t speak to each other the same way, they call each other out on it.

[00:22:29] Gretchen: That, to me, is just remarkable. You are raising a whole cohort of kids here, over a thousand of them, who will be able to go out into their environments, wherever they go, beyond their academic experiences with Carolina Kids Co-Op and be world-changers because you are setting expectation. I love the fact that they came to you and said, “You wouldn’t appreciate how we’re being spoken to, and you taught us differently,” which is really amazing. Which means you have set an incredibly high standard for them. In these final couple minutes, Jess, what would you want parents to take away from our conversation?

[00:23:10] Jess: I’d love for parents to stop trying to be perfect, stop trying to give the impression that you know everything, that you’re never upset, you’re never mad, you don’t fight with your spouse, you don’t feel disappointed, you don’t sometimes feel a lack of confidence yourself. Verbalize, let your kids see your struggles, talk through it. “I’m really frustrated right now. I’m going to take two deep breaths before I answer your question.” Model pausing, thinking. Naming the emotion is so important. I think we have this idea like, “My kids will feel like they’re floundering in the world if they think mom doesn’t have it all together. If I don’t have it all together, then there’s no hope.”

That’s not the case at all. I think sometimes the kids feel like there’s such a disconnect. “My mom’s perfect, and I’m such a mess because I’m always having these meltdowns.” I want to say, “Your mom had a meltdown in her closet last night. She just didn’t let you see it.” Let your kids see that you’re a whole human being and that you’re improving. Don’t just let them see that you’re a whole human being and you’re flatlining and you’ve got maybe an anger problem, but you’re not getting any better year after year. You’re still losing your temper with your kids just as quickly as you did last year.

Let them see, “I’m going to try this new thing. When you say something that really triggers me, I’m going to take five deep breaths.” Then do that and let them see that. It’s okay for them to see that they frustrated you, but let them see that you’re working on yourself. I think that is the number one thing that would change relationships between kids and parents, and that would give kids so much more confidence to not feel like, “Somewhere between 16 years old and 40 years old, I have to become perfect and not have meltdowns and not freak out about things because my parents don’t freak out about things.”

Yes, they really do. Just keep trying to get better as a parent. Figure out the thing. “I’m an anxious parent. I’m always working on my anxiety.” Whatever that thing is, your child should know what your struggle thing is and what you’re doing to try to get better every day.

[00:25:40] Gretchen: I can’t imagine you being an anxious parent. I’m sitting here thinking, “Oh my gosh, what an amazing experience it must be to be part of your cohort to watch you do what you do.” I want to say thank you. I want to say thank you to our audience. I apologize that we had to be Semper Gumby today, but you can see how wildly valuable this conversation was. I wasn’t going to let it go because I knew Jess was going to deliver in spades.

Jess Alfreds, thank you. Thank you so much for spending this hour with me. I am so wildly grateful. Despite the rain, now you have a little bit of sunshine behind you, so hopefully the rain is over. Everyone, thank you for allowing us to come into your living room for this important conversation. I know you see the value in it as well as I. Take care, everyone. Thank you so much. We appreciate you. We’ll look forward to joining you all again soon. Bye, everyone.