EdNC. Essential education news. Important stories. Your voice.

Search ednc.org

We Drive It: Inside the North Phillips School of Innovation

Share this story

Our republishing policy

EdNC is a nonprofit, online, daily, independent newspaper. All of EdNC’s content is open source and free to republish. Please use the following guidelines when republishing our content.
  • Our content must be republished in full. If your organization uses a paywall, the content must be provided in full for free.
  • Credit our team by including both the author name and EdNC.org in the byline. Example: Alex Granados, EdNC.org.
  • If republishing the story online, please provide a link to EdNC.org or a link to the original article in either the byline or credit line.
  • The original headline of the article must be used. Allowable edits to the content of the piece include changes to meet your publication’s style guide and references to dates (i.e. this week changed to last week). Other edits must be approved by emailing Hannah Vinueza McClellan at [email protected].
  • Photos and other multimedia elements (audio, video, etc.) may not be republished without prior permission. Please email Hannah Vinueza McClellan at [email protected] if you are interested in sharing a multimedia element.
  • If you republish a story, please let us know by emailing Hannah Vinueza McClellan at [email protected].
Please email Hannah Vinueza McClellan at [email protected] if you have any questions. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Canonical tag

Please include the following canonical tag in the <head> of the republished story.

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.ednc.org/we-drive-it-inside-the-north-phillips-school-fo-innovation-short-film/">

HTML content

This includes the title, byline, content, and tracking pixel required for republishing this story.

Copy & paste HTML
This story is tagged:

EducationNC’s new short documentary, We Drive It, highlights the work of a team of passionate educators and scholars in rural North Carolina.

In the high-poverty area of Edgecombe County called the Northside, schools have historically lagged behind on test scores and other metrics. That’s why changemakers there decided it was time for something radically different. It was time to build a new school from the ground up, a school specifically designed with students in mind.

The ultimate goal of this innovative new school? Self-actualization for students. Throughout a yearlong planning process, the team asked students and parents in the Northside what their dream was for school. Then they traveled across the country looking for innovative new approaches to teaching that they could bring home.

The result was a collection of learning experiences that create a brand new innovative school model: The North Phillips School of Innovation.

It’s a place where students experience social-emotional support from the moment they show up. In the morning, students meditate on their goals and affirm the successes of others in the space. They learn the required academic standards by completing exciting passion projects. And they discover the richness of their own identities, taking charge of their agency in the world.

This documentary follows the School of Innovation during its first year, which functioned as a pilot run. Next year, these innovative practices will be expanded to all eighth through 10th graders in the Northside of Edgecombe County.