Dr. Sunny Booker: Finding an Alternative Path for Young Learners 

For Dr. Sunny Booker, the value of providing an educational option for students who’ve faced struggles in their lives is more than an abstraction. As a child growing up in the Detroit area, she had to deal with a troubled family life, poverty and homelessness.

“My teachers were my constant. They inspired me that I could be whatever I wanted to be. I could feel good about myself at school,” says Booker, who now serves as Director of Alternative Education for St. Lucie Public Schools on Florida’s east coast. “So my personal mission is to remove any perceived barrier for as many students as possible.”

With approximately 1,500 students on her caseload, Booker likes to have a variety of options for those who did not find success in traditional school settings. For some of those students, she says, St. Lucie Acceleration Academy provides a hopeful, individualized path to a high school diploma.

“When Acceleration Academies came on, it gave me an opportunity to target older students, and those students who really need a flexible, respectful place to go,” she says. “Where their time is respected, where people understand that their day may not look like everybody else’s due to sometimes their own decisions and sometimes decisions they cannot help.

“It helps us engage students who missed the mark somewhere, but recognize on their own, ‘I really need school,’ ” she says.

SLAA opened in 2016 and now has two campuses in Booker’s district. The Academy boasts approximately 200 graduates and 200 more who are currently pursuing a highly personalized course of high school study.

”Since day one, Dr. Booker has been our biggest advocate,” says Academy Director Paige Latham. “She works closely with our staff to ensure that all students enrolled at SLAA get the attention they need. Her dedication to her work and our young people is apparent; it is through her support that SLAA continues to be as successful as it is.”

Acceleration Academies President Mark Graves echoes the praise of Booker and her district.

“Public education is not a one-size-fits-all endeavor and school district leaders in St. Lucie County certainly understand that,” he says. “A district should have multiple paths for students to pursue on their way to earning a high school diploma and we applaud the innovative spirit of Superintendent Gent, the School Board, Dr. Booker, and the staff who support our students and this partnership every day.”

While most of St. Lucie students come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, Booker once taught at a more privileged school in Virginia. There, she saw that wealth doesn’t guarantee a smooth path.

“I realized that all kids can be at risk,” she recalls. “They could have every gift in the world and be at risk.”

The Covid-19 pandemic and the shift to fully or partially remote learning has increased that risk for students of all backgrounds, she says. “A staggering number of kids” have fallen away during the crisis, and she worries about how many of them will never return to school and re-engage in laying the foundation for their futures.

Pandemic or no, she says, student engagement is job one. Young learners need to feel they are valued, even when they struggle, even when they push back.

“Engagement’s really our work,” Booker observes. “People think it’s content or instruction, and they also think it’s discipline or management — without engagement, you have nothing.”

SLAA engages students through a personalized course of study that provides one-on-one attention but also makes room for those who have to work around job and family commitments, who have dropped out and fear returning to a traditional school at age 18, 19 or 20, who bristle at being told to sit at a desk and take breaks only when their classmates do.

“I’ve gotten so many thank-yous from kids who’ve gone there,” she says of SLAA. “Right away, not years later, when they come back and say, ‘Thank you for putting me in that alternative ed school.’ They recognize that in other counties and other places, they may not have that opportunity.”

Booker credits St. Lucie Superintendent E. Wayne Gent for supporting efforts to engage and support the broadest possible range of students. And as she and her team cope with the pandemic, they have embraced the way technology can support their work.

Videoconferencing, electronic messaging and careful attention to the online work of remote learners are all increasingly central, she says.

Booker is an early fan of the Atlas Engagement Hub, a suite of tools developed by Acceleration Academies and being made available to districts across the nation. Atlas allows educators to keep track of student attendance and progress in real time, and to coordinate timely interventions while there’s still a good chance of getting a young learner back on track.

“Trying to re-engage is really hard versus looking for those warning signs and learning how to scoop them up beforehand,” she says. Such technology also gives educators a way to “catch” students doing well.

“It’s really important to carve out time to say, ‘I just checked and you got all good grades. That’s amazing!’ ”