The Change Rose: How Faith-Based Communities Can Change Outcomes for Public Education

By Kim Rice Smith

The Change Rose is an emotional challenge for Christians from award-winning columnist Kim Rice Smith. If you read her popular daily blog, The Heart of Warrior, you know faith and commitment to public education drive her heart. This book is quite different than her first two The Heart of a Warrior: Faith for the Journey and The Heart of a Warrior: Faith for His Boots on the Ground.

This powerful work of the heart will take you on a difficult but necessary walk through twenty years of service as a public school's board member. There are lessons learned, soul-searching questions that remain, and a call to the faith-based community to combine service with advocacy in order to strengthen the future of public education.

Because Mrs. Smith served the business and faith-based communities throughout those same two decades, each section comes with discussion questions to help readers explore and challenge their own hearts and beliefs regarding the meaning of public education. Do we still believe every child deserves a free public education? Do we want more than sound and basic?

The topics serve to make readers set aside what they think they know in an effort to understand the bigger picture. From start to finish, you will feel every emotion imaginable. One chapter may you leave you angry or filled with sorrow. Another chapter may leave you frustrated and wondering what can be done to make things better. Hopefully, the work in its entirety will leave you hopeful and more clearly focused on our calling as humans who care about each other regarding public education.

As with all her writings, each topic begins and ends with an unexpected journey of faith. Where your heart begins on page one of "The Change Rose" is hopefully not where it ends as you finish the last chapter. Let your expected outcome be changed by adjusting the soil. Grab a group from your circle of influence and begin to dig deep into how our hearts can move forward together for #EveryChildEveryDay.

Everything connects at www.kimricesmith.com.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Sep 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9798886160369

Book preview

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The Change Rose

How Faith-Based Communities Can Change Outcomes for Public Education

Kim Rice Smith

ISBN 979-8-88616-035-2 (paperback)

ISBN 979-8-88616-036-9 (digital)

Copyright © 2022 by Kim Rice Smith

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing

832 Park Avenue

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

UMAPS (United Methodist Advocates for Public Schools)

Prologue

Hydrangea Color: Pink (Meaning, Heartfelt Emotion)

Hydrangea Color: Blue (Meaning, Apology)

Hydrangea Color: White (Meaning, Bragging or Boasting)

Hydrangea Color: Purple (Desire to Deeply Understand)

Resources

About the Author

This book is lovingly dedicated to my amazing daughters. They have grown up paying the cost for my public service, and I will apologize until the day I die probably for what that service has required of them.

I thank God every single day that in spite of all the negativity they witnessed when they were younger and what they have seen and had to endure personally during my final term, they continue to serve as educators in this state and around the world.

I give thanks. I give praise. I give glory to the God who created them each so differently by design but so much alike at their core. I know the public spotlight has not been easy. I know there have been times when they just wanted me to quit and make all of our lives easier. I am sorry, but not sorry because I know God had me where he needed me for his purpose, not mine, and one day we will all understand.

Love,

Mom

Let me give you a new command: Love one another. In the same way I love you, you love one another. This is how everyone will recognize that you are my disciples-when they see the love you have for each other.

—John 13:34–35 (MSG)

UMAPS (United Methodist Advocates for Public Schools)

Their vision:

That every public school in North Carolina is fully funded to provide outstanding education for all students so that North Carolina public schools achieve the highest ratings among all schools in the US.

That the members of the United Methodist Church in North Carolina become a prophetic voice in the public domain and mobilize to advocate for public education so that North Carolina public schools provide equal, desegregated, and well-funded education for all children and youth.

https://nccumc.org/c4c/umaps/

Congregations for Children NCCUMC

Congregations For Children (C4C) is a statewide initiative of the United Methodist Church and focuses on reflecting the love of Christ to our neighbors by helping children in public schools who are living in poverty (https://nccumc.org/c4c/).

#BeUMC #EveryChildEveryDay

Prologue

It's ironic that I would author a book which would attempt to make connections between gardening, public education, and faith. I cannot get anything to grow in my own yard at all. I love flowers, especially hydrangeas, and have always wanted a garden full of every color bloom known to humanity, but God did not create me with a green thumb.

Gardeners know if you move a hydrangea bush to a different place in the yard or change nutrient and pH levels in its potted soil, you can easily change the color of the bloom. The ability to change the outcome of the bloom by adjusting the makeup of the soil has earned my favorite flower the name, the Change Rose.

He also didn't create me with a background in education. The plan he has for my life though, now that's a different story. Time and time again, he has taken my faith life and intersected it with public education. I have resisted, even fought with him in my head over where he was leading. Ultimately, he won. Much like the hydrangea, my faith and the outcomes of my own life have been changed by the adjustments of what both my mind and heart have absorbed over the last twenty years.

For two decades, I served on my local board of education. Our board was recognized as the best in the state at one time. We presented all over the nation on the topic of continuous improvement. I was selected to serve on the all-state board multiple times and was recognized by the North Carolina School Boards Association with the Individual Leadership Award. During that time, I also served as the Congregations for Children coordinator of the Sound District (Eastern North Carolina) of the North Carolina Conference of the United Methodist Church. Later, I would serve as their district lay leader. Along with those hats, I served as the president of our local chamber of commerce for several years. I have an eclectic life that weirdly works for the glory of God.

This book is a work of the heart. It is a battle cry for Christians. Why should public education matter so much to the faith community? Stay with me through this book, and you will discover it's all about the soil. Remember too that just because I write from my United Methodist roots, our schools need all of us no matter which denomination we call home.

Bloom Where You Are Planted

Before we can really begin to dig deep for understanding, you need to know a little about my community and the area where I have spent my life. My hometown is Havelock, North Carolina, which is home to Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point. My parents both came to live in Havelock as teens just after the base was built and commissioned in the early 1940s. It is my diverse and complicated home.

Havelock is the easternmost section of Craven county and bumps up against Carteret County. If you follow the Neuse River down Highway 101 and move west up Highway 70W, you move into the center of the county seat, which is New Bern. New Bern is a thriving community full of both rich history and cultural activities that appeal to all