Leading with Faith and Excellence: Joel Satterly

In this episode of the Just Schools Podcast, Jon Eckert interviews Joel Satterly, head of school at Westminster Academy in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The discussion covers Joel's diverse career journey, from teaching in an inner-city middle school in Lexington, Kentucky, to leading various Christian schools across the United States. Joel emphasizes the importance of integrating academic rigor with faith formation, highlighting Westminster Academy's commitment to this philosophy since its founding.

Additionally, the conversation explores the unique cultural diversity of Fort Lauderdale and how Westminster Academy reflects and benefits from this diversity. Joel notes the school's commitment to maintaining a size that allows for individualized attention and the significance of understanding and supporting each student as an individual.

The Just Schools Podcast is brought to you by the Baylor Center for School Leadership. Each week, we'll talk to catalytic educators who are doing amazing work. Be encouraged.

Books Mentioned:
Leadership by Henry Kissinger

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Twitter: @eckertjon
Center for School Leadership at Baylor University: @baylorcsl

 

 

 

Transcript:

Jon:

Welcome back to Just Schools. Today we're here with Joel Satterly, head of school at Westminster Academy in Florida. Joel, great to have you with us.

Joel Satterly:

Thanks, Jon. Great to be here.

Jon:

Now, you've had quite an interesting career, so if you could just give us a quick travel through your career that got you to Westminster, that'd be a great place for us to start.

Joel Satterly:

Sure. Maybe I'm a little unique in there's some guys and women in this industry that have military background, which I do, but also have an MBA. Which is kind of interesting, and a theological doctorate of ministry. That from an educational side, it's kind of an interesting mix.

My professional journey, I started like a lot of people teaching in a public school. I was in an inner city middle school in my hometown of Lexington, Kentucky. My job was to convince seventh graders who were poverty-stricken, that ancient world history mattered to their life, which was a great learning lab and I learned a ton. And through a whole series of events, wound up leaving that position and going to a growing Christian school, Lexington Christian Academy, where I taught and then moved into administration both at the junior high and high school level.

And in 1999, I took my first head of school position in Rock Hill, South Carolina. I journeyed from Rock Hill to rural central Florida, a little place called Crystal River where the manatees live-

Jon:

Wow, nice.

Joel Satterly:

...at a PCA church school there. A short stint outside Atlanta for a couple of years in another PCA church setting, and then up to Chicago where actually I think we met, Jon.

Jon:

That's right.

Joel Satterly:

When you were up there at Chicago Christian, a very old CSI Christian reform school system. And we have some mutual friends that are connected through that place. And then back down to Florida here, finishing my eighth year at Westminster Academy in Fort Lauderdale.

Jon:

Hey, well, you're definitely winning on the winters there.

Joel Satterly:

No doubt. Losing on the pizza though.

Jon:

Oh you are, but your body is grateful for that. I always say leaving Chicago was sad for me from what we get to eat, but it's probably added four or five years to life because everything I loved in Chicago was probably killing me. But the Chicago pizza is top on that list.

So love the journey you have and I think the shaping of your military background, the MBA, teaching in public school and leading in so many different contexts in independent schools, that certainly enriches you. But I want to talk a little bit about Westminster Academy because I was able to be there a few months ago and meet a lot of your team and do some work there. But I'm really curious about the thread that you see going through Westminster Academy since its founding to where you are now and what makes it distinctive in the climate that you're in, there in Florida right now?

Joel Satterly:

Fort Lauderdale, I think, was made famous by the movie Where The Boys Are, which captured the whole idea of Florida spring break.

Jon:

Yeah, that's a thing.

Joel Satterly:

And for a long time, Fort Lauderdale was the place and then it moved I think other places. So people have an image of Fort Lauderdale through that in a lot of ways. And it's not too far from being wrong. It tends to be a very secular place, a place of some international flavor. It's a very mixed, culturally diverse part of the United States. It can be very affluent, but they're wide ranges of affluence and poverty in this area. Very transient. So it's kind of interesting.

Westminster Academy was founded in 1971, birthed out of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church, which was one of the largest and first founders in the PCA. But one of the first very famous for the Coral Ridge hour back in the eighties that people might recall. And so Westminster was formed out of that. I like to joke, sometimes I say there are several great ironies that are true here. One is a Calvinist started evangelism explosion. D. James Kennedy, founding pastor at Coral Ridge started Evangelism explosion, which has had a huge influence in the world.

One of the other great ironies is the school that he helped get started, and I think in those days they were pretty fundamentalist and pretty conservative, started at a horse track because there weren't permanent space anywhere. So it used to be a place where you don't dance because it could lead to card playing and awful things like that. Yet the school starts in a horse track. So God has a sense of humor about that, I think.

But through all of that, I think there are a couple of things about Westminster that have been through puts for it that have guided it. One is a commitment to recognizing that academic rigor and faith formation are one in the same. And Christians should not settle for anything less than that. And a commitment to being excellent in how it goes about that. The other it would follow. And that was working to legitimize the Evangelical Christian Day School. Because I think Westminster, its founding was distinct from some of the other foundings of similar schools in the South in that it was founded away from desegregation and some of those other issues that may have fueled some of that.

South Florida was kind of a different time in a different place, a different set of variables. So it's been a place that's cared about being legitimate, it's cared about advancing the kingdom and been very committed to putting deep roots in the community.

Jon:

Now you mentioned the diversity and the international flavor Lauderdale and the amazing group of community resources you have there. How do you see Westminster reflecting and benefiting from that? I think earlier you talked about it being kind of an organic process. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Joel Satterly:

Yeah, so this part of the country's interesting. There's an organic diversity that... I believe I recently read where Broward County is the most diverse county in the state of Florida now, which would make it one of the more diverse counties in areas in the United States. But it's a happy diversity. One that is complimentary. So it is not to say that there aren't some tensions from time to time, but generally speaking it's transient nature helps with that as well. But you just have, the entire world is here. You go to the beach and you can hear multiple languages being spoken on any given day, for example.

So it means our student body is fairly diverse, particularly by Christian Day school standards, mainly because we admit the families that live in our local area. And even on the geographical part of Fort Lauderdale, all of it is diverse. So we don't have to work very hard at it. The challenge for us though is, like a lot of other people, is on the faculty and staff side. Figuring that part of the equation out. One of the other things that's kind of funny when people come to visit, when we talk about cultural diversity too, it's very localized. So we kind of joke that Spanish speaking folks, that's not diverse here.

Jon:

Right. Yeah, I totally understand that. I was just in South Carolina and I was in schools that were 95% African American. And we would call those diverse schools, but you're not seeing a ton of diversity in the same way you're saying for Spanish speakers in Florida, that's probably not going to be outside the norm.

Joel Satterly:

Right. It is interesting though. I haven't been here long enough yet to differentiate among the Caribbean Islands, but there are people that can. And so I don't want to downplay the cultural distinction because I do think that there are some deeply held... Like anywhere else human beings are what we are. So there are some deeply held pressures, but generally speaking, it's really a cool place to do this work because of that.

Jon:

Well, and that's where I think the diversity conversation sometimes gets derailed because we get into group and identity politics. And really each individual I described, I just mentioned the South Carolina schools that were 95% African-American. Within that, there are so many differences ethnically within those groups.

Joel Satterly:

Right.

Jon:

And the food, I always love the food culture. So I love going to places like Fort Lauderdale and I love Chicago for that and I love a lot of other cities because you can find so many variations on things. And I think we really lose out on the richness of what we do in education when we lose the trees for the forest.

Joel Satterly:

That's right.

Jon:

Even if I have three or four groups at my school, we're missing all the individuals there. So how do we make sure we see the tree that's inside that forest because there's so much richness there. So when we reduce diversity to groups, we're just missing the fact that you're not seeing the individual. And if we believe that our job as educators is to walk alongside kids to help them to become more of who they were created to be, you don't do that as a group.

Joel Satterly:

Right.

Jon:

You do that individually within a group and all of that is part of a relationship that you build, but it is with individuals. So I appreciate you saying that. What do you think Westminster does well in that regard to see, know and love each student? I mean, how many students do you have first of all? And then how do you ensure that each kid is seen, known and loved well, in a way that honors the calling that the school has?

Joel Satterly:

So we're a little over a thousand students, preschool through 12th grade. And one of the things that we're committed to is a size culture. Westminster really sees itself as between 1100 and 1200 student school maximum, complete maximum capacity, if every single kid fit exactly in the right grade that we needed them. You know how that works.

Jon:

Right.

Joel Satterly:

But we're about where we want to be size-wise, because at a certain size it's very difficult for students to be known and loved. There are realities of size. So that's a commitment that the school has had more recently. I think when it's founded, it was on a growth curve like everybody else. But I mean, I think over time it's learned that the value in having a very distinctive size culture. So that would be one. I wonder too, if COVID taught us something. I was just thinking when you're talking about being individual focused for a minute, for us at least, that COVID experience gave us a chance to figure out what is it we're supposed to be doing.

And one of the takeaways we came out with is education is fundamentally a life on life endeavor. And because it is, that means there's certain things that we need to be in the same space with each other to accomplish. At least most effectively. So there's a commitment to that. There's a commitment to seeing students that way. A lot of schools talk about differentiating instruction and that sort of thing, and we take our hand at that. I think one of the reasons we had you come here and help us, talk to us, and Lynn Swanner and some others, is we want to get better at that and recognize that.

But I think it's more of a posture of our faculty that they just do kids. They just get into their lives. And I was with a family last night, we were talking about taking a leadership role, a voluntary leadership role in our school. A very high level executive in South Florida. And the dad just got teary talking about what the different people in the school had meant for their family. And he started asking, tell me about that. And it's really just the gift of time. It's just really being intentional and saying, your child matters and we're going to figure it out.

Jon:

One of the things I liked about what you said earlier was that formation and excellence go hand in hand. So many times Christian schools have been maligned or fundamentalist schools of being anti-learning when in the end, at the end of the day, we're called to maximize the gifts we're given.

Joel Satterly:

Right.

Jon:

In studying the world, our place in the world, how things work, we're actually getting a better glimpse of God and how the world was put in this created order. So I really appreciate that perspective that you bring. And when you then couple that with seeing the individual and making sure that the goal is to not just get bigger, but it's to go deeper with each student so that he or she can go deeper in their formation and the excellence, and maximizing the gifts that they've been given. Not for self-actualization or a humanistic reason, but because they're created beings who we get the privilege of walking and helping them become more of that. That's the true blessing. And when you see that, that's what makes parents like the one you described tear up, because what a gift that is to families.

Joel Satterly:

And I think another part of that, with that, you're talking about the individual image bearer, is our commitment to worldview, jon. I mean, I think it bears out of our theological grounding and founding. But this idea of in worldview is such a trite word today, I realize and hate to even use it. But it is really significant in this particularly becoming more and more critical.

So we actually talked with our students and our faculty about that topic around three questions that we try to frame. Who is God? What is the nature of man? And what do you do with freedom? And you can talk about what is the nature of man? You can talk around, well, what is the student like? What is the teacher? How do we deal with dignity? What do we do with the fallenness? And how do we figure all that out? And the issue of freedom might be the most pressing issue facing our high school age kids today. And helping them understand freedom in the context of how they were created and made is the ultimate freedom. And that's what gives us this fuel to have an of individual focus.

Jon:

Yeah. No, I appreciate that. We always wrap up with the lightning round. So I'm going to go through three or four questions here. And I'm curious about this first one. So these are always a word, phrase, or sentence. The first question is, what's the best book or one of the most memorable books you've read this past year?

Joel Satterly:

I think I would say Kissinger's book on leadership.

Jon:

Interesting.

Joel Satterly:

Simply it's a bunch of chapters around individual world leaders in the mid to late 20th century that some of them are a bit more obscure than others. Just fascinating.

Jon:

Love it. What do you see as the biggest challenge facing education currently in the US?

Joel Satterly:

How we define success. How do we think through, what does all that look like?

Jon:

So if that's the biggest challenge, what's your best piece of advice to school leaders as they think about defining success?

Joel Satterly:

Everybody can't get a trophy.

Jon:

Okay. Very good. All right. We don't celebrate mediocrity.

Joel Satterly:

Right.

Jon:

It's one of my favorite parts of the Incredibles when they lay into that. So, all right, good. And as you look ahead, what's your best hope for education in the US as you look ahead in the year ahead?

Joel Satterly:

It feels to me like we're on the precipice of some sort of spiritual revival in certain places. And so at least I see a renewed... And one of the things, I think that the culture swinging in certain directions for different times helps the people of God refocus and it just smells that way to me. I could be wrong, but it feels like there's a movement happening. I realize Aslan never sleeps, right? But it just feels different to me than it did say five or six years ago.

Jon:

Well, I hope you're right. And again, as we get to lead for joy through truth and love, that's the kind of movement that we want to see-

Joel Satterly:

Right.

Jon:

... as we hopefully become more of who we're created to be so that we can be better conduits of that and not get in the way of what the Lord wants to do through us. So Joel, I appreciate your time and the work you do at Westminster. Thanks for taking the time to be with us today.

Joel Satterly:

My pleasure, jon. Thanks so much.