Education, Empowerment, and Exponential Impact: A Look at Imago Dei with Cameron Taylor
Dive into the heart of Tucson’s vibrant community through our engaging podcast series. We bring you captivating interviews and thought-provoking conversations that shed light on the diverse and inspiring stories unfolding along the streetcar route.
In this special edition, we take you back to school with an extraordinary interview featuring Cameron Taylor, Head of School at Imago Dei Middle School. Originally aired in 2018, we’ve unearthed previously unreleased footage to present an extended version of this enlightening conversation.
Imago Dei Middle School stands as a beacon of hope and empowerment for Tucson’s young learners. As a tuition-free private school located in downtown Tucson, it serves exclusively low-income families. Cameron Taylor shares the school’s remarkable mission, which centers on breaking cycles of poverty through transformative education.
Discover the school’s unique approach, including small class sizes and two-teacher classrooms, designed to provide individualized attention and focused instruction. Imago Dei Middle School believes in the power of community and embraces diversity as a cornerstone of its educational philosophy.
Learn how the school’s founders, two visionary Episcopal priests, initiated this incredible journey to make a lasting impact on the lives of their students and the community at large.
Join us on this insightful podcast as we delve into the profound impact of Imago Dei Middle School and its commitment to building a brighter future for Tucson’s youth.
Press play now and immerse yourself in the world of Imago Dei Middle School, exclusively on the Life Along The Streetcar channel. Listen to the full podcast and be inspired by this captivating interview with Cameron Taylor.
Embark on a journey of education, empowerment, and exponential impact at LifeAlongTheStreetcar.org.
Transcript (Unedited)
Tom Heath
Good morning. It’s a beautiful day in the Old Pueblo, and you were listening to KT DT Tucson. Thank you for spending a part of your brunch hour with us on your Downtown Tucson community sponsored, all volunteer powered Aurora and Roll radio station. This week, we honor the back to School tradition by going back to a school interview we did with Cameron Taylor. He’s head of school for a Mago Day. We originally aired this in 2018 and found some additional footage that didn’t make that show. Today is July 30, 2023. My name is Tom Heath and you are listening to life along the streetcar. Each and every Sunday, our focus is on social, cultural, and economic impacts in Tucson’s urban core, and we shed light on hidden gems everyone should know about, from Abatten to the University of Arizona and all stops in between. You get the inside track right here on 99.1 FM, streaming on downtownradio.org. Also available on your iPhone or Android with our very own Downtown Radio Tucson app. And if you want
Tom Heath
to get us on the show, check us out on Facebook and Instagram Life Along the Streetcar and head over to our website, lifelongthstreetcar.org. For information about us, contact button or maybe to listen to some of our past shows. And one of those past shows included the part of the interview from today with Cameron Taylor. This goes all the way back to 2018, one of the first stories we featured. It was also in the book, but then we uncovered some additional information that was not as part of that original broadcast. So we wanted to bring it back and have you listen to it. So here’s the interview we did with Cameron Taylor back in 2018.
Cameron Taylor
Yeah, my name is Cameron Taylor and I’m the head of school at Imago Dei Middle School. We are a tuition free private school in downtown Tucson, but we’re a little different in that we serve only low income families, so the kids and the families do not pay anything to come here. We provide everything throughout a regular school day, regular school year and then some through a lot of expanded programming and extended days and hours. And really our mission is to combat cycles of poverty through education. And so our goal is to provide students and families with the skills and the tools and the confidence to achieve their goals, whatever those goals may be.
Tom Heath
I understand the school has been this is the 13th year of the school, and you got involved in year two.
Tom Heath
What brought you here to begin with and kind of why have you stuck with it?
Cameron Taylor
So it’s a funny story how I got involved. I had just started dating a woman who had gotten a job here in year two, and there was only a handful of students in year one. There was five kids and one teacher in the parish hall of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church. And year two moved to an old apartment complex a few blocks north of here on 6th. And my then girlfriend, now wife got a job at the school in year two. And I think in an attempt to impress her, I began volunteering and doing really some cool art projects with the kids.
Tom Heath
Is that your background is art?
Cameron Taylor
Yeah. And the rest is history or it backfired terribly. I’m not entirely sure. But we’re both still here, still involved. And really it’s because of the community and the kids and the families and the need. Tucson is consistently one of, if not the poorest large city in America. The economic disparity in town is pretty stark. Anybody who spent any time here knows that our proximity to the border and our diverse and unique kind of immigrant community
Cameron Taylor
is so beautiful and diverse and robust. But with that come a lot of needs and a lot of struggle. And this community, from the very beginning, thanks, I think, to its founders, has really been about community and about working together to solve problems on a larger scale than just kind of individual problems. So when we think about breaking the cycle of poverty, we think about it individually, but we think about it as far as families and neighborhoods and communities. We’re hoping that our kids will go back to their neighborhoods and work towards similar goals and share what they’ve learned and share their passion and share what they’re capable of with others. So we kind of feel like hopefully the idea is that the impact is exponential. Yes, we have a certain amount of students and then a certain amount of families, but we view it as something bigger than that. And so that just really stuck with me from the beginning. And working with the kids was a surprise to me how much I enjoyed it. And I must have been all right at it. And after a couple of years of hounding me, the founders finally talked me into coming on staff. And I started as the art teacher and figured out that I had an ability to kind of that building something structurally like a sculpture or furniture or something is not that different from building something programmatically. And that I really liked the process of building in that way and so just kind of took on various roles throughout the years until now. There aren’t really too many more roles from it. This is it.
Tom Heath
Tell me briefly about the founders.
Cameron Taylor
It was two so two Episcopal priests, susan Anderson Smith and Anne Sawyer, who had, uh, various life experiences here and in other cities that just really led them to believe that the surest way to combat poverty at a grassroots level is through education. And there are a handful of schools like us in the country and some programs that are similar. And so they took the model of the Epiphany School in Dorchester, Massachusetts, just part of Boston, and brought it to you know, it’s pretty terrible business model when you think about it. We have a really high cost to acquire our customers. It costs a lot to service our customers and then our customers pay nothing. So it’s an interesting business model but our results can be seen throughout the community and it’s really pretty visionary on their part to undertake something that did have significant investment as far as just energy and money and that kind of stuff. But for social gains down the road and to be able to convince people to buy into
Cameron Taylor
that vision is pretty impressive. So it’s nice to be a part of something like that in the long standing Episcopal tradition of kind of trying to write social justice ills through education. We don’t proselytize. We are not making episcopalians. We’re trying to help wonderful, incredible citizens develop. We do have worship. We have religion classes. Our religion curriculum is academic in nature and our worship is inclusive and led by a student vestry and is designed to be as welcoming as it can be to an incredibly diverse population. You know, we we’re diverse not just in the various faiths of the students and staff and and family members, but ethnicity wise and where the kids are from. About a quarter of our population are refugees from African conflicts. We have refugees from other parts of the world as well central America, the Middle East. Many of our students are learning English and are from Spanish speaking countries. And so we have a very diverse community in general. So although
Cameron Taylor
we are an Episcopal school, we’re welcoming to everybody except kids of all faith. No faith, it doesn’t matter to us. We really believe that there are many paths to God and the power of what we’re able to do together when we are in community with each other and when we are willing to have those relationships and talk about those things openly is limitless.
Tom Heath
The school itself, it’s four grades 5678, correct?
Cameron Taylor
Yes.
Tom Heath
And by design you have a cap on member on enrollment?
Cameron Taylor
Yeah. So we cap out at 80 kids, 20 kids in each grade and then two teachers in every classroom for a ten to one ratio, which is pretty good compared to public schools and really any place. And again, all that is by design. We believe that the small class sizes and the two teachers provide an opportunity for our kids to receive more individualized and more focused instruction. One of the kind of consequences of poverty is inconsistent education experiences. And so with our refugee and immigrant community those kids are potentially learning a new language, learning a new culture. Their educational experience may have been different in wherever they lived previously. They may have been in school, not been in school. Families in poverty tend to move around a lot. So those small class sizes and the two teachers are really designed to be able to provide a really focused impactful, effective almost an intervention. I mean, it’s really trying to meet the needs of students in their really formative,
Cameron Taylor
critical academic and social kind of evolutionary years.
Tom Heath
If you’re just joining us, we’re listening to an interview we did in 2018 with Cameron Taylor, head of school for a Mago Day. Found some additional footage in the archives that never made the original airing, so wanted to bring you the extended version here today in honor of going back to school. You’re listening to life along the streetcar on downtown Radio 99.1 FM and [email protected].
Tom Heath
Welcome back. We are in the middle of an interview that we recorded back in 2018 with Cameron Taylor from Amago Day Middle School in downtown Tucson. At the time, we were doing shorter interviews because we had multiple interviews per show and we didn’t air some of what we had discussed. So now that we’re through this one interview format, we have more time and wanted to give you the full extended version. We’re going to finish up the second half of that interview right now.
Tom Heath
And before we started the interviews, taking a tour, it indicated that some of these kids are coming in. They can speak four or five different languages, but in an academic sense, it’s a struggle for them.
Cameron Taylor
Yeah, especially with the students who are coming from other countries, especially our African students. It’s not uncommon for them to speak a couple of dialects of whatever language is in their region or their country. Swahili, Kiswahili, that kind of stuff. Kenyawanda is a big one. And then also some French or little German, sometimes some Dutch, because there’s more linguistic influence maybe where they’re coming from. And what’s incredible is that how quickly those kids pick up English and Spanish. So usually our African students by the end of the year are speaking English pretty well and can get by in Spanish and it’s pretty neat to see.
Tom Heath
Tell me about the curriculum. It’s a standard middle school curriculum.
Cameron Taylor
Yeah, because of our class sizes and the amount of teachers and volunteers and the fact that we’re a private school, we’re able to really meet the kids where they are and meet their needs more specifically. So we know that these kids are going to go on to other high schools, public, private, all kinds of high schools. And so we obviously have to have a baseline set of what they need to know. But we have a little bit more flexibility just because of our size and being a private school to where we can reach kids in a variety of ways that maybe in public school setting it’s not feasible because of funding and staffing and that kind of stuff. So it’s a standard curriculum. But we’re able to, I think, maybe get a little more in depth or investigate things further, explore things a little deeper because we can where we deviate is probably outside of our core curriculum. So in part because we have extended hours, we have a ten hour school day and in part because of our downtown location, we can
Cameron Taylor
offer this incredibly robust enrichment experience. So it’s our enrichment programming, but everything in the arts and physical education and anything kind of outside the core classroom. So in addition to their language arts and history and math and science and writing and those things, our kids are also blowing glass at Sonoran Glass School and taking their art classes are all taught at Tucson Museum of Art. And they do capoetta with a group downtown and they play tennis downtown and they cycle downtown and they’re really able to take advantage of all these really cool organizations and agencies and groups down here to be able to do a bunch know, really cool stuff that would be impossible for us to offer as one organization. We really view our campuses all of downtown Tucson and not just our buildings and then know, we have U of A and tons of partnerships over there. And so we’re really in kind of a sweet spot where it’s easy for us to access a lot of really cool stuff and we try to access
Cameron Taylor
as much of it as we can.
Tom Heath
But that wasn’t always the case. When you first moved to this location, tucson was not as robust as it is now.
Cameron Taylor
And I think there was some mean it was tucson has developed, as you know, dramatically really in the past five, six years. And you’ve been here, we’ve been here eight. And so we were the only thing on the block for a long time. And outside of a few long standing kind of stalwarts, most of the businesses down here are new, at least in our time. And it wasn’t always the case. But again, I think our founders were just kind of prescient in knowing that this would be a good long term move for the school. And certainly I think some people could say there was risk involved, but it worked out. And there were a lot of people who were still intimately involved with downtown that were know, fletcher McCusker was really a big part of us coming think, you know, if it weren’t for some other kind of leading voices and some other people, you know, we should do this, then maybe our founders would have thought twice about it. But it’s turned out to be an incredible move. The downtown community has been incredibly
Cameron Taylor
welcoming, has been our kids. We don’t really have any safety concerns. We’re out and about all day long. And in general, we don’t really have any issues. We found, again, since we view our whole camp, our campus, as all of downtown, it’s kind of incredible to think how fortunate we’ve been, actually, that our kids are able to experience an entire really diverse, kind of burgeoning neighborhood.
Tom Heath
As you explained, a lot of your students come from a variety of backgrounds, and showing them a sense of community outside of the four walls, I think is an extremely helpful educational tool. And it’s worked out well for you financially. I mean, you’ve gone from renting. You now own what used to be the Sears headquarters.
Cameron Taylor
Yeah, I think it was a corporate headquarters for Sears and Kelly’s Market next door, among other things. I think it was a jewelry store, maybe right before we moved in. There was some real secure cages in the back. Let’s just hope it was jewelry. Yeah, exactly.
Tom Heath
The cages are gone, but it’s a fairly deceptively large facility from the outside. You’ve got quite a lot of space in here.
Cameron Taylor
Yeah, it’s funny. It’s like a row house or a brownstone or something. Our facade is not that wide, but it’s very deep. And we actually have a huge, enormous school in here. And it’s really nice, actually, I think that we’re kind of tucked away, and I think it just adds to a bit of safety and allows us to, again, take advantage of this bigger, broader, cooler community in a way that we weren’t able to before. So having a permanent home and having everything we need down here and anything we don’t have in our facility, we can find somewhere else. And it’s been a really great relationship with downtown.
Tom Heath
Well, a couple of things to touch on here.
Cameron Taylor
Sure.
Tom Heath
You had mentioned your ten hour days that’s a little bit unique. And you go to school eleven months out of the year.
Cameron Taylor
Yes.
Tom Heath
And that’s a part of helping to really adapt with the needs of the students and kind of catch them up.
Cameron Taylor
Yeah, there are a few reasons. Partly it’s academic, is that we talked a little bit about the potential for kind of an inconsistent educational history. So it allows us to make bigger strides in a year, especially when we’re dealing with students or families that are acquiring a language and learning a new culture and that kind of stuff. But it also provides really, a safe place and some childcare. And many of our families are in a situation financially where they need to work quite a bit. And we’re talking about kids between 910 years old and 1314 years old. So having those long days also provides some support and some stability for our families. They know that there’s a safe place for their kids to be.
Tom Heath
So you’re selling an expensive product to consumers that don’t pay. So where does the funding come from?
Cameron Taylor
So, again, we’ve been incredibly fortunate. Tucson is an amazing place. All of our funding comes from the community. We receive no federal or state funding of any kind, so a few grants and some foundation money and that kind of stuff. But the vast majority of it is small donations from community members, either through charitable giving or through Arizona’s tax credit law. So you can give as a direct tax credit as an individual or a family, and corporations can as well.
Tom Heath
And then for the students, they’re not paying, but they are invested. I think you use the term that you want them to be all in.
Cameron Taylor
Yeah. We want it to be a partnership between us and the families. So it’s important to us that we work together and that we understand that in any partnership there may be disagreements about things and that we may get some pushback on our really long days or we have high expectations for our students here. And we understand that there may be some pushback, but we want to have that discussion and talk about why and what works for each other and to be able to reinforce each other. None of the stuff that we’re doing academically with the kids really matters if we’re not reinforcing each other families and school, then the values and the character traits and the academic experiences that we’re trying to give to our students don’t really matter because they’re at ODS with maybe what parents are saying. Or what parents are saying is at ODS with what school is saying. So we want to work in partnership. That doesn’t mean that we have to be right all the time or that families have to buy in in
Cameron Taylor
a way that doesn’t feel like true partnership. But we want to make sure that we’re all on the same page and that what we want is the best for our students.
Tom Heath
Being engaged. Families being engaged doesn’t mean being in agreement. It just means having an active conversation about what you agree and disagree upon.
Cameron Taylor
And understanding that we can figure out ways to work past that. I mean, obviously there are things that are non negotiable for us. Right? You have attendance, you have to come to school.
Cameron Taylor
But we understand that our families have challenging lives.
Tom Heath
Your relationship with your students does not end at the end of 8th grade.
Cameron Taylor
It does not. So part of what makes us unique is our graduate support program. In addition to curriculum, while the kids are with us in grades five through eight, we also track and support and mentor and help our students in any way through high school and beyond whatever comes after that. So that’s everything from them coming over after their day of high school because they’re hungry and they need a snack, or they need a place to write a paper, or they need a tutor to helping our kids and our families get through FAFSA paperwork and applying for college or finding vocational training. We’re expanding that programming now to include all kinds of programming through workshops and partnering with other organizations to include everything from resume building to financial literacy to various skills trainings like CPR and other skills that families and kids might find useful. We’re really trying to eliminate some of the barriers that families living in poverty face so that they can go from kind
Cameron Taylor
of a survival mode to thriving. Surviving to thriving.
Tom Heath
How does someone if they want to discuss moving their children here, how does that happen? Do you have space?
Cameron Taylor
So we currently have some space in the fifth grade. So anyone looking for a new home for their fifth grade student, anyone who wants a private school education and all these opportunities, we’re taking our kids to camp for a week next week in Prescott can call us. Our phone number is 520-882-4008 or you can find us [email protected]. And really, fifth grade is the key. We have waiting lists in grades six, seven, and eight, and it’s pretty hard to get in because we’re having such success. 85% of our kids are going on to private high schools with full rides, and over 90% of our kids are graduating high school, which is about 25 percentage points higher than regional and state averages in Arizona.
Tom Heath
If you get in on the fifth grade, do you start over in the 6th grade, or are you sort of you’re in?
Cameron Taylor
Yeah. Fifth grade is not a traditional middle school year, and we like to think that we’re providing kind of a head start on high school and that getting in in fifth grade will set our kids and our families up better for whatever comes next. The only qualifier for attendance is the financial, so students have to qualify for free and reduced lunch. There’s no test. There are no other qualifications. We’re trying to meet the needs of any and all families. So it’s really just that financial qualification.
Tom Heath
That was Cameron Taylor, head of school for Amago Day, originally recorded back in 2018 with some bonus footage that did not make that first show. It’s one of the benefits of going to a single feature each show is we’re able to dive a little bit more deeply into those topics. Originally, we were very aggressive and thought we could get two features each show that was not only just exhausting for a volunteer staff, but it was not allowing us to get as much information out as we had hoped. So we switched that a few years ago, and then we come across these archives with some extended interview material. Well, my name is Tom Heath. You are listening to life along the streetcar on downtown Radio 99.1 FM and streaming on downtownradio.org.
Tom Heath
Thank you very much.
Cameron Taylor
Enjoy your evening.
Tom Heath
Bye bye, and thank you for listening to episode 258 of Life Along the Street Cars. We honored the back to school tradition by going back to a school interview from 2018 with some bonus footage never aired before. If there’s anything you’d like us to cover, hit us up on Facebook or Instagram, maybe head over to our website page, lifelongthestreecar.org and let us know. And as we head out today, we’re going to listen to some music by the Masaka Kids Africana. The song is called Back to School. My name is Tom Heath. I hope you have a great week and tune in next Sunday for more life along the streetcar.
