We are Crew,
not passengers.
Crew is the heartbeat of life at Lillie May Carroll Jackson. Built on the EL Education tradition and rooted in the strength of our girls, Crew is where our scholars are known, challenged, and loved — every Monday in Community Meeting, every Friday in our Blooming Lillie Circles, and every moment in between.
Trustworthy
Empowering
Same Crew. Same Crew leader.
Every year she’s with us.
On her first day at Lillie May, every scholar is assigned to a Crew — and she stays in that Crew, with the same Crew leader, for as long as she is with us. By graduation, her Crew leader has known her for years, not weeks: her growth, her family, her hardest seasons, her best work. That continuity is not an accident. It is the design.
One Crew leader
Known by name, every year
An EL Education tradition,
made our own.
In the EL Education model, Crew is the structure that ensures every student is known well by at least one adult and held to a high standard of character and contribution. The phrase “We are crew, not passengers” comes from Outward Bound founder Kurt Hahn — a reminder that no one rides along; everyone pulls together.
At Lillie May Carroll Jackson, we took that tradition and grew it into something distinctly ours. Each scholar is assigned to a Crew on her first day — and stays in that same Crew, with the same Crew leader, for the full arc of her time at Lillie May. Our Crew is shaped by the lives, voices, and brilliance of Black girls in Baltimore. It is where our three-part definition of achievement — Mastery, Character, and High-Quality Work — comes alive through ritual, relationship, and the honest work of growing up together.
Mastery of Knowledge & Skills
Crew protects the conditions for deep learning — safety, attention, and high expectations.
Character
We name and practice the habits of a Lillie May scholar: courage, integrity, compassion, grit.
High-Quality Work
Crew gives our girls the audience, the feedback, and the belief that their best work demands.
Community Meeting
sets the week.
Every Monday, the whole school gathers as one Crew. We open the week with our shared values, celebrate the girls and adults who lived them last week, and name what we’re working on next. It is part assembly, part rally, part family table — and it tells our girls, before anything else, you belong here, and what you do this week matters.
- Welcome & GreetingEvery scholar greeted by name. No one slips into the week unseen.
- Shared Reading or AnchorA poem, a quote, a piece of student work — something to hold onto.
- RecognitionCrews shout out character, effort, and high-quality work from across the school.
- Week AheadWhat we’re studying, what we’re celebrating, what we’re standing for.
- Send-OffOur school chant. Heads up, hearts open, ready.
A Monday at a glance
45 min
Daily Crew Meetings
hold the middle of the week.
Between Monday’s whole-school gathering and Friday’s circle, our girls meet with their Crew every single day. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday — same Crew, same Crew leader, year after year. This is where goals get set, work gets revised, character habits get practiced, and the small things that make a school year add up. It is quieter than Monday and Friday — and just as essential.
- Greeting at the DoorEvery girl welcomed by name. Every day. The first message of the morning is “you belong here.”
- Check-In RoundOne word, one weather report from the inside — so the Crew leader knows the room before the work begins.
- Habit of the WeekThe character habit we’re practicing — courage, integrity, voice — named, modeled, rehearsed out loud.
- Working TimeStudy skills, peer feedback, goal review, work-of-the-week. The unglamorous, essential work of the middle.
- Day-Ahead Send-OffWhat each scholar is carrying out into her classes — and what her Crew is rooting for her to do.
A daily Crew at a glance
45 min
Blooming Lillie Circles
close the week.
On Fridays, our girls gather by grade level for Blooming Lillie Circles — our restorative, ritual-rich version of Crew. We sit in a circle. We pass a talking piece. We tell the truth about our week, name what bloomed, name what was hard, and tend to each other. It is where character work gets real, where conflict becomes repair, and where each girl practices being known.
- Opening RitualCenter, breathe, set the circle. A grounding piece chosen by the Crew.
- Check-In RoundOne word, one feeling, one weather report from the inside.
- Bloom & BudWhat bloomed this week? What is still budding? Each scholar speaks.
- Repair & RecommitHonest talk about what got in our way — and what we’ll do differently.
- ClosingAffirmation for the girl on our left. We leave the circle holding each other.
A Friday Circle at a glance
45 min
Our lineage is a circle,
and the research agrees.
Crew didn’t come out of nowhere, and the case for it isn’t sentimental. Here’s the tradition we’re standing on — and what decades of research say about why a structure like this changes outcomes for girls like ours.
The lineage we’re standing on.
Crew didn’t begin in a Welsh boarding school in 1941. The practice you’ll see in our halls — girls and women holding each other in circle to name what’s true, repair what’s broken, and bless each other forward — is centuries old. We are standing on a long, unbroken line of Black women’s sister-circles: the kitchen table, the church mothers’ board, the Freedom School, the stoop, the salon. EL Education gave us a vocabulary for it. Black women gave us the practice.
Lillie May Carroll Jackson
For 35 years, Mrs. Jackson ran the Baltimore NAACP from her own home — kitchen-table strategy, living-room circles, and a quiet insistence that no one in her city would face the work alone. The school is named for her, and her practice is the practice we keep.
Baltimore · 1889–1975
The Black Church & Mutual Aid
Sister-circles, mothers’ boards, missionary societies, and mutual aid associations have held Black communities together since freedom — and long before. Our circles are kin to theirs.
Sister-circle · mothers’ board
Freedom Schools & Civil Rights
Septima Clark and Ella Baker built schools and movements in circle — democracy, literacy, and liberation, learned around the same table. Our Crew is their inheritance, made local.
Septima Clark · Ella Baker
Sister-Circle, Today
From bell hooks to the Combahee River Collective to contemporary sister-circle wellness practice, Black women have kept refining the form. Our Friday Blooming Lillie Circles join that living tradition.
bell hooks · Combahee · sister-circle
“We didn’t borrow this. We inherited it.”
What the research says.
Effect size on achievement
Strong teacher-student relationships are an accelerator of learning.
In John Hattie’s Visible Learning synthesis of more than 1,500 meta-analyses, teacher-student relationships sit well above the 0.40 threshold for “above-average” impact on student achievement.
Hattie, Visible Learning (2009)
Percentile-point gain
SEL pays academic dividends.
A meta-analysis of 213 social-and-emotional-learning programs covering more than 270,000 students found participants gained an average of 11 percentile points in academic achievement.
Durlak et al., Child Development (2011)
Why this work matters here
Black girls are pushed out at disproportionate rates.
Kimberlé Crenshaw’s landmark Black Girls Matter report documented Black girls being suspended at roughly six times the rate of their white peers in some districts. A Crew that knows your name is one of the most powerful counter-structures we can build.
Crenshaw, Ocen & Nanda (2015)
A protective factor
School connectedness changes everything downstream.
The CDC defines school connectedness — students’ belief that adults at school care about them as people — as a protective factor for attendance, graduation, and well-being.
CDC; Wingspread Declaration
Looping & continuity
Staying together pays compounding returns.
Research on “looping” — keeping students with the same teacher across multiple years — reports gains in instructional time, family trust, and stronger relationships. Our Crew extends that principle.
Burke (1996); Forsten et al. (1999)
Evidence in schools like ours
EL middle schools show real impact.
An independent Mathematica evaluation of EL Education middle schools in New York City found positive impacts on student achievement, with stronger effects for low-income students and students of color.
Nichols-Barrer & Haimson (2013)
Sources listed for further reading. We share these not as a marketing argument but because the case for Crew is strongest when our practice and the evidence are speaking the same language.
Crew, customized for our girls in Baltimore.
The EL framework gave us the bones; our community gave it skin, breath, and voice. Three commitments shape how Crew lives at Lillie May.
Built for Black girls’ brilliance.
Our rituals, language, and texts center the lives, leadership, and joy of Black girls. Crew is not where they assimilate; it is where they are seen most clearly.
Rooted in Baltimore.
The city is in our curriculum and our circles. We name our neighborhoods, our families, our griefs, and our pride — and we use Crew to turn that into power.
A garden, not an assembly line.
We chose “Blooming Lillie” on purpose. Growth has seasons. Some weeks we bloom; some weeks we bud. Crew is the soil that holds our girls through both.
Step inside our Crew.
Crew is more than a structure we explain on a page — it’s something you and your daughter will feel the moment you walk into our building. If you’re coming to a Crew event at LMCJ, this page is your preview. You’ll meet the educators who will know your scholar by name for years, see the rooms where Monday Community Meeting and Friday Circles happen, and hear directly from current girls and families what it actually feels like to grow up here. Welcome — you’re already crew, not passengers.
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