High School

Disclosure :: This post is sponsored by Take Note.  The Journey to Impact "We need a school that looks like Disneyland but operates like Harvard," said Chakesha Scott as she began dreaming of ways to change the education landscape in Baker, Louisiana. In 2014, Scott turned her aspirations into reality by establishing Impact Charter School, Baker's inaugural and only locally-based charter school. However, the journey to fulfill her dream was filled with adversity and challenges. As the founder and CEO, Scott describes the process of opening a charter school in Louisiana as "one of the hardest things I have ever done in my life." Through it all, Scott would lean on her "why,” the students. “The children I witnessed suffering in Baker's...

Property Brothers :: Money, Mercy, and Monopoly Flashback to New Year’s Eve, 2021. That night, we stayed in as Covid cases had spiked and gifted us with the Omicron variant. I would eventually become well-acquainted with Omicron a few weeks later. But on this quiet and cozy evening playing board games, laughing, and enjoying the “Mini Sweet Tooth Buffet” I’d pulled together following a last-minute Target run, I looked around and felt better than I’d felt in months. I could have sworn I tasted a bit of sweet hope intermingled with the sour gummy worms. That night we played Monopoly as a family for the first time. It had been at least a decade since I’d opened the game, and pulling that...

In Defense Of Public Schools Public or private? This seems to be a very hot topic nowadays. It’s easy to see why. We want our kids to have the best of the best, don’t we? We want them afforded every opportunity available to them so they grow into mature, responsible, HAPPY adults, right? That’s the goal! My family and I are very fortunate to live in a great public school district where we know they’ll thrive, but the question of public or private honestly never came up in discussions about education when our kids were babies. After all, my husband and I both went through the public school system and had no solid complaints. So here’s some reasons we LOVE our public...

Help My Baby Turned Into A Tween And Needs Deodorant As mothers, watching our children grow and develop can be a rollercoaster of emotions. It feels like just yesterday you were changing their diapers, dressing them in their favorite cartoon character t-shirts, and wiping away the crumbs from around their smiling mouths. But as time goes by, our babies transform into young adults, and one of the first signs of this change is the need for deodorant. How many times do you ask yourself: "Is my child really growing up so quickly?" You might even pause to reminisce on the first day you smelled their sweet cheeks. Yet here we are, shopping for deodorant because they need it. Who knew there...

Mom, I'm So Sad All The Time: Ending The Stigma Begins At Home In early 2021, both of my beautiful, amazing sons told their father and me that they were struggling with mental health issues. This was during a year that brought with it a cancer diagnosis for our 10 year old, more Covid chaos, the death of their grandfather (whom they loved dearly and saw almost weekly since their births) the death of their great-grandmother (whom they were also very close to), unrelenting anxiety and hopelessness for our 16-year old, plus the day-to-day struggles that life, middle school and high school brought with it.    As divorced co-parents, their father and I have made it clear that we are always open...