Scheller grew up in South Kingstown, R.I., “where I knew from a young age that I wanted to be a teacher. Well, I knew I wanted to be two things,” she says. “I always wanted to be a teacher and I always wanted to be a singer. So I’ve done both.”
For much of her career, Cynthia Scheller has asked one question: How could she have a larger, more positive impact on students? As City Connects’ new Director of Student Support Programs and Practice, she’s finding answers.
Scheller studied music as an undergraduate and earned a master’s degree in voice. One of her favorite operas is The Magic Flute, in part because she often sang the opera’s “Queen of the Night” aria.
After graduate school, Scheller became a music teacher and learned the leadership lessons that come from teaching music to large groups of kids. During her years as a teacher, she earned a doctorate in Educational Leadership, but she found that getting a job in school leadership wasn’t easy.
“My doctoral program was about being an advocate for students and about breaking down barriers for teachers so that they could teach. But it was hard to break into administration. At the time, in the district I worked in, administration was a male-dominated field, and a lot of people had spent 20 years in the classroom and then moved on to administration. I had only been in the classroom for seven years.”
Nonetheless, Scheller found an opportunity as a fellow in Rhode Island’s Department of Education, where she was part of a team that evaluated teaching and learning and developed plans to help schools change.
“When I was at the Department of Education, I saw great work happening in Providence, where the teachers were developing a new curriculum, so there was buy-in, and no matter what elementary school a child attended they would have the same education. That was important given the transiency in the district, and it was groundbreaking at the time.”
Scheller went on to become an elementary school principal, first in Providence then in North Kingstown. Even then, Scheller wanted to have more impact. Eventually she learned about City Connects.
“I looked up some of City Connects’ reports, and I thought, Why haven’t I heard of this program? It’s only one state over. And why doesn’t every single school have City Connects?”
As a principal, working at times with a part-time psychologist and a part-time social worker, Scheller had struggled to provide students with support. Teachers helped out, but there was no systematic approach. Now, as City Connects’ Director of Student Support Programs and Practice, Scheller ensures that City Connects is implemented with fidelity in more than 200 schools from Massachusetts to Minnesota and Indiana to Dublin, Ireland.
“I ensure that our center coaches support our program managers so that they have the training they need to support the coordinators and build relationships with principals. We’re building professional learning communities so that we can collaborate and reflect on our approach.”
“I’m really pushing people to look at data,” Scheller adds. “Data can be a dirty word because it takes time for our coordinators to collect it and enter it into our system. But data is so powerful. It informs change. With data, we can make sure that we have the services and community partnerships that students need. With data, we can inform principals, we can inform policymakers, and we can inform funders — we can ensure that the practice is being done with fidelity.”
Scheller says that having principals and superintendents who support and invest in City Connects boosts implementation.
Encouraging growth is another important focus for Scheller.
“We’re working on expansion. We want to expand in schools, where educators believe that they should know the strengths of every student and where we can include students’ voices so that we know what their interests are, and we can provide enrichment experiences and cultivate new interests, which is something schools often don’t have time to do.”
“I see us expanding into more rural settings and figuring out how we can work with community partners and whether we can form virtual partnerships. We’re also taking a strengths-based approach to schools, looking at what structures they have in place that they can build on to support students,” Scheller adds.
“Family voice is something that we’re also always working on. Since the pandemic, parents are more apt to ask for help, and that’s important because that gives us more of a sense of what’s going on in our students’ lives.”
“The most exciting part,” Scheller says, “is that we’re reaching so many students, and I think we can reach so many more.”
