“I think a lot of people look at a school like Parkway West and they think like, oh my gosh, these kids. They come from this affluent community and that’s not always the case. I think I even had trouble coming to West. I taught at a more impoverished school my first year teaching and I was like, I don’t know if I should leave these kids and the more time I spend at West, the more I realized that even kids who have a lot of advantages– they might not need as much help reaching like their academic potential, but you know, a lot of them just need love and confidence-building and having adults care about them. That gives me purpose.” – Erin Fluchel, English teacher