Duke School Under the Oak Magazine, Fall 2020

I wanted to tell you what Duke School meant to
me and why I love Duke School so much.
I was so well served by the school. I feel like I
think the way that I think and that I work with
people the way that I do because of my time
at Duke School. I love creative approaches to
problem solving. I think that is really rooted in
my preschool through eighth grade education.
But Duke School taught me how to be a
thinker, fundamentally.
School was also a very safe place for me when
so much of my childhood at home was really
hard—really, really, hard. And that’s not to say
that my father didn’t create the most loving
environment that he could. But having someone
with brain cancer deteriorating in front of you as
a child, and that’s all you know, for eight years
… home was a hard place to be. School was my
happy place every day, every year.
I never felt like I couldn’t be myself at Duke
School. I just felt so embraced by every
classmate, every teacher. And that approach
to being able to feel free to be myself, free to
think and approach problem solving the way
that I wanted to, the way that made sense
to me, that there was no wrong way I could
approach something at Duke School—that’s
so empowering to kids. That has set me up for
everything else. And I feel like without Duke
School—without that education—I don’t know
that I would have that at all.
Debbie: That is definitely music to our ears at
Duke school—even more now that we are in the
21st century where everybody is talking about
design-thinking, innovation, and all of those
things. You go back and I think the basis of it is
where we were to begin with.
Rebecca Feinglos Planchard ‘03
After graduating from Duke School in 2003, Rebecca Feinglos
Planchard attended Durham Academy and Duke University.
She taught kindergarten and was an instructional coach
for Teach for America in Dallas, Texas, for four years. She
earned a master’s degree in public policy from the University
of Chicago while also serving as an early childhood policy
associate and communications consultant in the Chicago
mayor’s office. She is now a senior early childhood policy
advisor for the North Carolina Department of Health and
Human Services.
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