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Survive, then Thrive – Inside Baton Rouge’s chartered boarding school

The walls no longer beige, the halls no longer quiet, and the dorms of the former Louisiana School for the Visually Impaired no longer empty, Thrive BR is doing just what its name promises—growing, learning, improving.

Sarah Broome, the 26-year-old executive director of this unique residential charter school, says although it is the school’s first year, the 20 students from East Baton Rouge Parish who were referred to Thrive and are enrolled there are already seeing academic improvement.

Thrive Board President Norisha Kirts says while charter schools are not the entire solution to education reform, the new school does meet the needs of a group of students “who need additional time and an environment free of distractions.”

In all, there are nine staff members, including a social worker and four residential advisors who care for their sixth-grade charges Monday through Friday.

Broome, an Ohio native, was teaching at Prescott Middle School through Teach for America when a student there was fatally stabbed in a street fight.

Broome saw that death as avoidable.

“I don’t know if this would have helped the student that I lost,” she says. “The fight happened on a weekend, and so it’s not necessarily saying [that] physically she would have been safer here. But would she have had the best possible chance? I think so at a place like [Thrive].”

To make her idea a reality, Broome gathered a group of Teach for America alumni, local school leaders and guidance counselors and “kidnapped them for 48 hours,” she jokes.

Broome put to each of them the same question: If money wasn’t an issue, if there were no limits, if you could do whatever you wanted to do for children, what would you do?

From that discussion, Thrive was born, she says.

With volunteers, including local CEOs, doing manual labor on the facility in the middle of the night, Broome says the school’s birth was a community effort.

“It’s not like this is easy, but things really did fall into place,” she says.

To finance the residential aspect of the school, Thrive uses private funding from individual donors, local businesses and organizations, and a few national, family-focused foundations.

“I think Baton Rouge is an incredibly unique community, and being an outsider gives me a different perspective on that,” Broome says. “I’ve never seen a state or city that cared so much about education or where people were so well informed about education. In other areas it’s not as much a part of the daily discussion as it is here.”

Kirts stresses that the students at Thrive haven’t performed well in the past not because they are not bright, but because they needed more attention and time to focus without distractions.

“I don’t want to wait until I have kids to decide that the education system is not suitable,” she says. “I want to work to reform it now, and Thrive is one of many ways that we can advance education reform in East Baton Rouge and prepare students for college.”

With a long list of doctors and nurses on call, Broome says her mother back in Cincinnati tells her she’s “a brand-new mom.”

She only gets 36 hours off a week. In those 36 hours, she’s a normal 20-something, spending time at the gym and tailgating during the fall. But she also reflects on the week, and at the end of those 36 hours, as any mother would, Broome says, “I miss those kids.”