CHAPEL HILL — Monday, Sept. 16 started off like any Monday at any normal preschool.
The kids walked in, shepherded by their parents, and got to playing. There were art and puzzles and Play-Doh crafting and baby doll-caring. After a little bit, the teacher called the class to the carpet.
Meghan Friday, The Learning Trail’s preschool director, began to sing a song about the different fingers on your hand. The thumb, the pointer, so on. Then she reinforced some letters — A, B, C, and so on.
It was a normal day at The Learning Trail, which can only be described as a somewhat abnormal preschool.
See, The Learning Trail is located in the Nature Trail neighborhood, a trailer park right down the road from the entrance to Governor’s Club off of Farrington Road on the northeastern side of Chatham County. The Learning Trail only serves children living in Nature Trail, and it’s a picture of when wealthy meets poor for what those involved say is the greater good.
Started with an idea
In 2007, Governor’s Club was home to a group of former educators, and if you know any teachers, they’ll tell you that you never really stop being a teacher.
“They knew about this community and they saw a need for after-school tutoring,” says Suzanne Morris, current president of The Learning Trail’s board of directors. “So in the fall of 2007, six tutors and six third-graders started here.”
Morris wasn’t here when The Learning Trail started, but the 33-year vet of special education got plugged into the program in 2011. By then, the number of tutors had grown beyond 25 and the student population expanded beyond third grade.
Anyone who is somewhat intimately familiar with the program will tell you about Carol Tomasen. She became the de-facto director of The Learning Trail after the original leader moved to Maine. In 2011, Tomasen and Morris and another individual started an after-school tutoring program for middle schoolers.
People like Carol Tomasen helped make the program what it is today, but this story of community service is marred by sadness. Last fall, four years after Tomasen spearheaded a drive to make The Learning Trail an official nonprofit, she was killed in Washington, D.C.
“We had just initiated a strategic plan, to develop a strategic plan for the next couple years going forward,” Morris said. “She was here the day we started that plan, and she went away for the weekend to Washington — that’s where one of her daughters lives and her grandchildren. She was up in D.C. and was walking across a street and was hit by a truck, and she didn’t survive her injuries.
“We had Carol’s vision. She had been with us at the beginning of this planning. So we moved forward. Here we are.”
Where we are now is a far cry from that early day of six kids and six tutors.
The Learning Trail now serves kids from preschool to eighth grade. Forty-eight students come to the pair of buildings for after-school tutoring, and Meghan Friday has 10 kids in her preschool class. Between 50-60 tutors will show up — all from the Governor’s Club neighborhood a half-mile down the road — to help Friday or tutor kids after school.
Finding a niche
Nature Trail is a bit unassuming. It deceived Morris the first time she came back into the neighborhood.
“When you drive by in the spring, you see ‘Nature Trail’ on the rock,” she said. “I thought it was a hiking trail. There’s a white fence and there’s all these beautiful white Bartlett pairs in bloom. If you drove back there, this is the show place here. This circle here, these houses are the best of the best. There’s a lot of pride in these and they add porches. But if you go back in, it’s trashy. It’s really trashy. And the kids live in that.”
The program takes up a couple of buildings near the entrance to Nature Trail. After following a driveway to the entrance circle, you park your car on the right side, where you see three small buildings. The middle one is the Nature Trail’s managing office, but the one on the left and the right serve as classrooms for the kids.
The classrooms look like any normal classroom. There’s white boards and desks and chairs and various educational charts lining the walls. There’s carpets and bathrooms everything that goes with a school, plopped into this mobile home neighborhood.
Most if not all of the residents of Nature Trail are Latinx, which meant the program needed a bilingual teacher when they hired a preschool director for the first time prior to the 2018-2019 school year. Meghan Friday had worked in public schools for many years and even taught at a Spanish-speaking elementary school in Washington, D.C. After moving to Durham with her family, she began looking for jobs and met with Morris and Tomasen.
“When I met with them and heard about their mission and head what they were doing, I was like, ‘Yep, I’m in,’” she said. “I felt the mission was amazing and they were so passionate.”
The preschool children come in Monday through Thursday from 9 a.m. to noon. Friday usually has one or two volunteer assistants for the day, sometimes focusing on specifics like art or even yoga.
“At that age developmentally, they’re trying to figure out how to play on their own, play with their friends, get along with their friends,” Friday said. “And then we have a big focus on teaching them English because most of them come in knowing very little English.”
Providing some help
The volunteers make a significant difference in the life of the school, Friday says. On this particular Monday, Christine Duprez Young is doing some painting with the kids, and Ken Wilson is helping a couple children with puzzles. Ask any elementary school teacher — 10 students is a lot to handle on your own, so having an extra pair of hands or two is significant.
The dedication of the volunteers was surprising and impressive to Carla Murray, who is now in her fifth year as principal of nearby North Chatham Elementary, where Nature Trail kindergarten through 5th graders attend. When she arrived at the school in 2014, Tomasen came to meet with her.
“From that very first meeting to right now, it has been an awesome support system,” Murray said. “For not even just tutoring, also for families and community. They fully embrace the families and that community-school partnership is beautiful.”
The volunteer support was a different experience for Friday as well.
“Sometimes when you’re in a public school, it’s really hard to get things done,” she said. “Here, somebody will have an idea and the next week we’ll be doing it. A lot of the people are senior citizens and they’ve had these great careers and they have all these great talents that they’re able to bring in and do in a fresh new way with 3- and 4-year-olds. A lot of the kids were just entering kindergarten never having gone to school before. Now they’re gardening and doing yoga and doing art. It’s pretty special.”
That volunteerism extends beyond Governor’s Club residents. Morris said many other community groups have stepped in to provide help of various kids. Two years ago, the Women of Fearrington gave The Learning Trail a grant for a garden, which has been used during the program’s summer camp and is regularly accessed by the preschool. Other funding comes and has come at various times from groups like the United Way of Chatham County, the Triangle Community Foundation and residents of Galloway Ridge.
Some new opportunities
Morris said one of the goals of The Learning Trail is not just to educate the kids, but to broaden their horizons and their parents’ horizons.
“So much of the research on getting kids reading and ready for school is all about early childhood education,” she said. “The children that live here live in an environment where Spanish is pretty much the main language. Parents are both working or the mother is at home. Maybe they have one car. Their world is very narrow. The children’s experiences are very narrow. So knowing the research and knowing what this population experiences, starting school already behind, we felt like that’s where we want to put a lot of our emphasis.”
And the parents get an education too. One of the program’s grants is used for that purpose in particular. For eight or nine meetings a year, The Learning Trail hosts different speakers for parents, ranging from nurses to literacy specialists to immigration lawyers to yoga instructors. Parents have even gone on field trips with their preschoolers to the Chatham Community Library in Pittsboro and the farm at Fearrington Village. Seventy-six families got Christmas gifts last year from Learning Trail volunteers.
It became part of the program’s mission to provide more than just education to the kids, Morris said. It may have started as a tutoring program, but became so much more.
And people outside the neighborhood say they see the effect. Murray said she’s had students come up to her at school and talk about a birthday gift they got from a volunteer. The Learning Trail, in her view, provides a conduit to education that school sometimes can’t be for various reasons.
“The work that they do is amazing because families will reach out to them,” she said. “It’s those relationships that they’re building that I think the kids respond so well to. We’ve had parents say, ‘Can you please get us a spot there?’”
Tristen Perlberg, the principal at Margaret B. Pollard Middle School, where Nature Trail 6th-8th graders attend, said The Learning Trail is “at the top” in terms of community support for his school.
“It just shows that people are invested,” Perlberg said. “They understand that everybody, whether you’re a student at this school or a parent or a community member, they’re a vital part of what makes this school successful. We’re just fortunate that they realize that and give back.”
Learning Trail tutors regularly discuss their students’ progress at their regular schools and get to know what skills kids need help on, like math facts, multiplication, sight words and reading skills. Middle school students have some of that, but they mostly spend the time working on homework with help from volunteers.
Doing more than now
Morris said she’s excited about what kids have been able to do after The Learning Trail. Some have begun participating in the Advancement via Individual Determination, or AVID, programs at their high schools. To help those kids out, Learning Trail volunteers created the Carol Tomasen Memorial Scholarship Fund. Applicants must have been in The Learning Trail for at least two years, plan to go to college or community college and write an essay. Multiple kids qualified for the scholarship this year.
“It couldn’t be more appropriate to what Carol was all about,” Morris said.
They would love to expand the program, but the classrooms are already pretty full, so there’s a waiting list.
In August, ahead of the school year starting, Morris walks around the two rooms for the kindergarten through third grade after school programs, straightening chairs, just making sure everything is set for the upcoming year. She gives additional kudos to the owners of Nature Trail, who is giving the facilities to The Learning Trail rent-free.
“We’re very fortunate,” she says. “Otherwise we wouldn’t have a program.”
The summer camp, the after-school help, the preschool program — it’s all part of what is frankly a wealthy neighborhood reaching down the road just a bit to a less-wealthy neighborhood and seeking to make a difference. For Friday, who came from the often-bureaucratic and sometimes slow-moving world of public education, it’s a night-and-day difference.
“For me, it’s kind of a magical place where somebody has an idea and next thing we know, we’re doing it,” Friday said. “It just seems like everything falls in place and always a new volunteer will show up with a great idea and kids will get a great experience. It’s just nice to have people who really care about the community and share that with kids.”
Reporter Zachary Horner can be reached at zhorner@chathamnr.com or on Twitter at @ZachHornerCNR.