Faculty Spotlight: Learning Specialist
Dr. Cindy Moore Story by Kathy McPherson
Cindy Moore never doubted that she wanted to work with kids. “I was always a babysitter. I was always the person that the adults in my life left in charge of kids. I always have loved kids, even when I was a kid. I knew that I wanted to do something related to kids. I think I actually knew that it was either a psychologist or a pediatrician, and I was afraid of medical school.” Moore’s apprehension about going to medical school was medicine’s loss and Durham Academy’s gain. She pursued a career in psychology, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees from N.C. Central University and a doctorate in school psychology from UNC-Chapel Hill, and came to Durham Academy in 2007 as the school’s first full-time learning specialist. “The only thing I knew about Durham Academy at that time was that my godson [Xavier Nonez ’17] went to Durham Academy.” Moore attended college with Nonez’s mother, Kemi, who serves as DA’s director of Diversity and Multicultural Affairs and assistant director of Enrollment Management and Admissions, and “we’ve been friends since that time.” It was Kemi Nonez, who began working at DA in 2009, who encouraged Moore to talk with then-Headmaster Ed Costello about working at DA. For years, the school had contracted with learning specialists at The Hill Center, with several Hill faculty members spending about 10 percent of their time at Durham Academy. But the number of DA students needing services was increasing, and Costello told Moore the school needed a full-time learning specialist. “He said to me when we were talking about it, that basically we would be flying the plane and building the plane all at the same time because there had never been a learning specialist here, and I was totally fine with that.” Moore served the entire school until 2014, when Jennifer Rogers was hired to work with Middle Schoolers and Upper Schoolers as a learning specialist. Moore began her psychology career in Durham, doing assessments of children from birth to age 5 for the state of North Carolina. “It was probably the smartest job for me to have at that point in my life because I was a part of a team. I worked with speech language therapists, an occupational therapist, physical therapist, social worker, pediatrician and psychologist, and we did interdisciplinary assessments. I learned so much about the whole child.
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Durham Academy // Summer 2018
And my mentor there was the person who told me that I needed to go back to school, that I needed to get my Ph.D.” After completing coursework for her doctoral degree, Moore did a year-long internship with the Superior Court Child Guidance Clinic in the District of Columbia. “I did all court-appointed assessments — psych assessments, child custody assessments, therapy. I went into juvenile detention centers and did assessments on girls and boys. It was a lot of work, and it was really hard.” She came back to North Carolina, finished her dissertation and worked with the Chapel Hill nonprofit All Kinds of Minds and at UNC-Chapel Hill before joining DA. Moore had attended public schools in the D.C. suburbs of Maryland’s Prince George’s County and “never thought about being at a private school in any way.” She considered working as a psychologist in the public schools, but thought she likely would be assigned to three public schools. “I really wanted to be in one place and feel a part of one place, and so in that way, Durham Academy was very, very appealing. I was nervous, obviously, because I knew in my mind what I thought DA was. The thought that they needed a learning specialist, I didn’t know what that really meant. It took me a couple of years to kind of figure that out.” Moore embraces her job as learning specialist for Preschool through Middle School. “My whole goal is to get kids to be OK with who they are and be OK with the kind of learner they are, to be able to advocate for themselves and understand what they need, and to be OK if they don’t do well on a test or if something’s