Carolina Day Magazine

Upper School Principal Trip Cogburn and Assistant Principal Margot Moses are not only educators, they’re incubators of innovation. For years they’ve led the Upper School through some of its most challenging years, all while quietly planning a program that will change the lives of Carolina Day students and the trajectories of their future careers.

Confidence, purpose, vision, and innovation are earmarks of a CDS graduate. The building blocks for these key qualities begin as early as Pre-K with a transformational leadership framework that grows alongside CDS students. Each grade tackles a progressively more challenging project meant to strengthen students’ sense of identity, community, leadership, and action and agency. 

Perspective: you’re a new employee at Carolina Day School, a staff member who has never taught children before. You breezed through school as a bright, obedient student with no discernible learning differences, and you’ve navigated your adult career without too many internal or external obstacles. You enter a room with your cohort of new faculty and staff hires and sit at a child’s desk as you wait to be led through what you’re assuming is a routine training module. It will turn out to be anything but routine.

When Jacquelyn Nasti was hired as the new Director of After Care at Carolina Day in 2021, she had a vision. After working at an aftercare program at a French immersion school in New Orleans, she was brimming with ideas about the wide variety of enrichment classes she might offer at Carolina Day. A highly creative childcare professional with a degree in writing, she was energized by CDS’s culture and integration of outdoor education.

“I was not a very athletic kid,” Director of CDS Athletics Tauni Butterfield says. “My middle school and my high school athletic experience was awful.” She remembers being a heavyset child, interested in fitness but brushed aside by her PE teachers, made to hold the rope while the boys in her class climbed it, or to sit on the sidelines with other girls while the boys wrestled.

Albert Einstein. Octavia Spencer. Tommy Hilfiger. Leonardo DaVinci. Whoopi Goldberg. Anne Rice. Googling famous people with dyslexia will produce a list of notable entertainers, designers, architects, scientists, writers, and mathematicians, even Tech CEOs and a few millionaires. It’s a result many with preconceived assumptions about dyslexia might find surprising.