Civil Municipal - Oct 2023

262 CIVIL AND MUNICIPAL VOLUME 4, ISSUE 10 practical learning. Students gain knowledge and have the opportunity to practice technical and social skills that make real- world connections to what they learn. Balancing Collaboration vs. Competition Beyond the classroom, the Greenbrier School District collectively executes this balance of nurture vs. nature with what they call the Railroad Track Model. Martin says to look at it like a set of railroad tracks, where one side is about “the results we have to get for students in our school community… [and] the other side is about relationships… to move down the track towards our mission and vision, we have to have a balance of both,” she explains. Superintendent Scott Spainhour expounds on the model by explaining its practical application, saying, “when our kids are competing, we want them to [be] the best… we all want to be the best district we can be… so we look around and see what others are doing, how they’re doing it, and see how we can maybe do it better.” “We’re competitive, we like being the best. But as far as our teachers and our kids, we have to be very nurturing. It’s a different world today than it was years ago, and kids need to be loved and need to be nurtured. They need to be cared for,” Spainhour says, explaining that the execution of this balance between nature and nurture allows Greenbrier to provide the kind of education to which its students will respond. And it’s no wonder that the Railroad Track Model is so adamantly applied. With two of the district’s elementary schools being over 50% in the poverty range, another two elementary schools falling above 40%, and its middle and junior high schools sitting right at 40% – the sheer socio- economic diversity within the Greenbrier School District simply demands such attention to detail. These children come from a wide range of backgrounds and need an equally wide range of resources to match their lived experiences,