The Nardo Foundation:  Supporting Teaching Innovation at the High School Level

Annually, the Nardo Foundation honors one teacher at Brookhaven's Cross Keys High School with a Teaching Innovation Award and Grant.  The recipient is picked through an application process administered by Principal Dr. Brittany Cunningham and her faculty/staff. 
Each applicant outlines a project to help students at Cross Keys and a plan on how the funds would be spent.
We have funded field trips to Atlanta's National Center for Civil and Human rights and electronic notebooks to help Spanish speakers excel in learning English.  

Twania White -- Inaugural Recipient in 2023

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Mission: 
​Ms. White's mission is to educate and provide avenues of joy in the lives of others.  She accomplishes these lofty aims by utilizing her ability to build positive relationships and her gift to fill in gaps where there is need.

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Use of Innovation Grant: 
​Ms. White used her Teaching Innovation Grant to take 90  students from her Multicultural Literature class to the Atlanta's National Center for Civil and Human Rights.  This trip's aim was to connect the literature they were reading to true history; further, many students had never visited downtown Atlanta and the neighborhoods that were and still are a cradle to the Civil Rights movement.  These students were moved emotionally and intellectually by the trip.

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Short Biography:
Twania A. White is currently a high school teacher and school leader at Cross Keys High in Brookhaven, GA. The school is in region 1 of the Dekalb County School District. She has been in the field of education most of her life, becoming a certified teacher in 1999, giving her a total of 25 years as an official educator. However, she has worked in the school system and with youth programs for well over 30 years. She moved to the Atlanta, GA, area from Kansas City, MO, where she attended college, in 2003. She was employed by the Gwinnett County School district upon relocating here and started a youth group, called Atlanta Youth on the Move.  That group provided mentoring for youth and an opportunity for them to travel to an exciting youth camp in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri each summer experiencing life as they may have never thought possible. She is now loving her full encounter in the Dekalb County School system, educating and building the youth, as well as positively molding the school’s culture and climate as a Coordinator at Cross Keys.

Mary Liz Walker -- 2024 Recipient

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Mission: 
​Ms. Walker's mission as an educator is to serve her students holistically—emotionally, mentally, and educationally—by creating a safe, inclusive, and supportive learning environment where they feel valued and empowered. She is committed to fostering academic growth, promoting linguistic development, and nurturing emotional resilience, ensuring that each student has the tools and confidence to succeed, no matter where they come from. By building meaningful relationships and celebrating diverse backgrounds, she aims to inspire a love of learning and to help students realize their full potential as capable, compassionate, and lifelong learners. Her favorite quote comes from Rita Pierson:  “Every child deserves a champion—an adult who will never give up on them, who understands the power of connection and insists that they become the best that they can possibly be.”  That sums up her teaching philosophy!

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Use of Innovation Grant: 
​Ms. Walker teaches 9th grade literature and composition (ESL/English as a Second Language) to a unique group of students. Each of her students has spent less than two years in the country and are still in their early stages of developing their English proficiency skills. Sometimes she has up to 6 languages in one class!

Ms. Walker will use the grant from the Nardo Foundation to create and provide interactive notebooks for her newcomer multilingual learners. Research shows that continued use of interactive notebooks promotes language acquisition by providing personalized learning, structured organization, visual supports, encouraging reflection, and translanguaging. Students can take these notebooks into their next literature class and continue to use their notes and experiences throughout the rest of high school with proper care. She looks forward to giving her students this opportunity without asking anything of them, as many of them come from low-resource areas.

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Short Biography:
Before moving to Atlanta in 2012, Ms. Walker earned her Bachelor’s degree from the University of South Carolina. She began teaching English online to students overseas in other countries, but slowly noticed the dire need for passionate educators willing to be a bridge for newcomers in my own backyard, giving them a stepping stone to success in the U.S. public education system as multilingual learners. This fueled the fire when she decided to pursue her Master of Arts in Teaching ESOL from Valdosta State. It is also what landed her at Cross Keys High School, where 97% of our student population come from multicultural backgrounds. Ms. Walker has been honored to be the 2024-2025 Cross Keys High School Teacher of the Year, and she is even more proud to have served our students, staff, and community here for over 5 years, acting as the bridge between the Intensive English program and sheltered instruction within the school.