Tommy Reddicks
Executive Director, Paramount Schools of Excellence Indianapolis
I'm the first to say that what we do isn't really innovative. What we do is tried and true and we're standing on the shoulders of others and we work really hard, but I think our creative problem-solving along the way we can attribute directly to our ability to be good improvisors. And I think you have to be, especially in the inner city. The demands on you are very different than maybe a rural or suburban area. So we need to be very responsive to our family and to our school culture. And that takes a pretty high bar in terms of creativity. We like to scaffold with excitement. We've got six goats, 25 chickens, five beehives, five wind turbines, a peace park, a large urban garden. These are all things that are incentives to be in the space, to come to school, to get there.
So, you survive the rigor that you have to go through in order to achieve academically. But you're excited about the process because there's so much going on — scaffolding— all the work you have to do. Any of the integration with what would be going on in our urban farm or some of those scaffolding pieces, those would be a culmination of what you've done after you've learned and applied the standard to get there. And so we're not a direct integration of going to the goats because they're gonna make us smarter; we go to the goats because we understand the academic process and the concepts behind life cycles or producing a product or selling cheese and working the math on that and then going to be a part of the cheese-making process.
