From Montgomery to Browne: Investing in Great Teachers

At Browne Academy, we ask our students to remain curious, seek out perspectives beyond their own, ask difficult questions, and continue growing in their understanding of the world.

We believe the adults who teach and lead them should do the same.

This summer, four members of the Browne faculty and staff traveled to Montgomery and Selma, Alabama, for a professional learning experience centered on American history, the Civil Rights Movement, racial injustice, and the people whose courage helped change our country.

Made possible through the generosity of Browne Academy’s Annual Fund donors, the experience offered something professional development cannot always provide from a conference room or computer screen: the opportunity to stand where history happened.

Learning From the Places That Hold Our History

Over four days, members of the Browne team encountered the people, places, and stories that shaped the Civil Rights Movement and considered how that history continues to inform our understanding of citizenship, justice, leadership, and community today.

In Montgomery, they visited Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. served as pastor, and learned more deeply about the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the people whose collective courage sustained an extraordinary movement for change.

At the Legacy Museum and Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, they confronted the history and lasting consequences of slavery and racial injustice in America. Standing before the National Monument to Freedom, surrounded by more than 100,000 surnames chosen by formerly enslaved Black Americans after emancipation, brought a scale and humanity to history that cannot be replicated on a page.

The journey continued along the route traveled by those who marched from Selma to Montgomery for voting rights in 1965. Walking across the Edmund Pettus Bridge offered space to reflect on what courage can demand of individuals, and what becomes possible when people act together.

At the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the team encountered another chapter of American history through a memorial dedicated to thousands of Black victims of racial terror lynchings. It was a solemn opportunity to remember individual lives, confront painful truths, and consider the responsibility we share to ensure that difficult histories are neither diminished nor forgotten.

What We Bring Back Matters

The value of professional development is not simply what someone learns while they are away. It’s what they bring home.

Experiences like this one give Browne’s faculty and staff opportunities to think more deeply about how we create a school community grounded in Excellence, Diversity, Character, and Community.

That matters because diversity at Browne is not confined to a single lesson, celebration, or moment on the calendar. It’s who we are. More importantly, it’s how we prepare children to engage thoughtfully with a complex world.

We want our students to become leaders who challenge assumptions, have the courage to confront injustices, and be empathetic enough to learn from the experiences of others that differ from their own. Our core values are not simply words on a page; they’re a roadmap for our students to live a life rooted in serving others well. After all, how else do we expect them to nurture welcoming communities?

But that work doesn’t begin with them; it starts with the adults who surround them. These conversations matter. Change isn’t possible without difficult conversations. Our faculty and staff are exploring new and age-appropriate opportunities for how we thoughtfully prepare our students to approach difficult moments in history. This includes helping our students, and our entire Browne community, understand the systems that shaped injustice, while also studying the courage, organizing, faith, and collective action of people who worked to transform their communities. The physical spaces, from Montgomery to Selma, reminded us that history happened in real neighborhoods, through real relationships, and because people decided that change was possible. 

We want students to leave these lessons understanding that history is not distant, justice is not automatic, and meaningful change has always depended on people who were willing to act with courage and in community.

It Starts With Us

This year’s Annual Fund theme, It Starts With Us, is rooted in a simple idea: the Browne experience is shaped by what each of us chooses to invest in it.

Sometimes that investment is visible—a new resource in a classroom, an opportunity for a student, or an improvement to our campus. Other times, its impact begins long before a student ever experiences it directly.

An Annual Fund gift can send four members of the Browne team hundreds of miles away to learn. They return with new knowledge, deeper perspective, and questions that travel with them into conversations with colleagues and into the work of educating children.

The impact continues from there.

When we invest in the people who teach, guide, and care for Browne students, we invest in every child who will learn from them.

See What Your Support Makes Possible

Professional development is one of the many ways Annual Fund support strengthens the Browne experience. But giving doesn’t begin and end with the Annual Fund. Explore how every gift is an investment in a child’s future. It starts with us and what we make possible, together.