Today, we are honored to profile the extraordinary Deborah Brown, Middle School Director, The Exploris School in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Students at The Exploris School gather each morning for a meeting built around one simple idea.
“We are all crew, not passengers,” said Deborah Brown, Director of Exploris’ Middle School campus. At Exploris, “crew” refers to small groups of students who meet with their teacher each day to explore the school’s core values of Innovation, Relationships, Social Empowerment, Curiosity, Craftsmanship, Responsibility, Connections to Nature, and Reflection.
The refrain could just as easily describe Deborah’s own career, a three-decade arc that took her from a military kid moving school to school to being part of the founding team at one of North Carolina’s most talked-about charter schools. Earlier this year, Deborah was named 2026 North Carolina Charter School Principal of the Year for her work leading Exploris, a K-8 school that opened in Raleigh in 1997.
But how did Deborah end up in a leadership role at the very same school her own children once begged to attend?
The Classroom as Anchor
Deborah was a military child — her father was in the Air Force — whose family was constantly on the move. While being “the new girl in class” multiple times could have made school feel unstable for Deborah, it ended up having the opposite effect.
“The classrooms really became my anchor,” she said. “Teachers were always the first to greet me, and they were the first to put books in my hands.” Those books became the one constant she could carry from base to base.
That early experience of being welcomed warmly by teachers who made a genuine effort pointed her career path toward the classroom.
Deborah earned her Master’s Degree from Syracuse University and is a National Board Certified English and Theatre teacher. She began her career teaching language arts in New York City’s traditional public schools, working with theater and debate programs along the way, before relocating to North Carolina in 1999 and joining Wake County Public Schools.
“I like to say I’ve been working in education since the 1900s,” Deborah said.
A Parent’s Introduction to the Charter Sector
Deborah’s path to charter schools didn’t come because of a career move. She was motivated to find charters by her own kids.
Her family found a magnet elementary school that they loved. But as her oldest child approached middle school — what Deborah calls a “fulcrum point” where kids either find their footing or get lost — she wanted something different from the large, 2,000-student campuses in the county system.
Research led her to The Exploris School, then a small, project-based middle school with a global focus. Her family didn’t get in right away, and the acceptance call didn’t come until six weeks into the school year. By then, her son had already settled into his district school and made friends.
Exploris offered him a shadow day anyway.
“He told me that he immediately felt like Exploris was his home and that he had to go there,” said Deborah, who also enrolled her daughter at the school a few years later.
Deborah, who was teaching within the Wake County system herself, was immediately struck by the freedom Exploris educators had.
“They had the ability to be creative and responsive in ways that felt out of reach at the district level, especially at a larger district, where any real change had to be approved and adopted at the top before it could reach a single classroom,” she said. second year.
That contrast came into sharper focus when Deborah heard that a new charter school was opening in Research Triangle Park, one that the city of Durham was actively fighting over worries about competition.
The model — flipped classrooms, project-based, cross-curricular — was everything she’d been trying to build without the room to do it. She joined the founding team of Research Triangle High School, which opened as North Carolina’s first fully flipped public charter school with students driving classroom instruction, and spent seven years there as Director of Professional Development and English Language Arts Department Chair.
“That was maybe the best experience I’ve had in my career,” she said. In 2017, Deborah was named the North Carolina Charter School Teacher of the Year. “I don’t think you could pigeonhole me back into a county position again.”
Water Fountains and the Water Cycle
After seven years at Research Triangle High School, Deborah made the move to Exploris in 2019 and became the school’s Middle School Director.
The timing meant her first year at Exploris was largely upended by the COVID-19 pandemic. Deborah said the instinct for reinvention she’d developed after being part of the founding team for a charter school carried directly into navigating those early challenges at her new position.
Exploris’s model has evolved over the years into what Deborah affectionately calls “a little Frankenstein.” It is expedition-based and project-based at its core, with pieces of Montessori and global education layered in.
To illustrate, Deborah points to one of Exploris’s longest running and most impactful projects, which began with a middle schooler’s complaint: the school water fountain wasn’t cold. That led to a follow-up question about the water fountain’s proximity to the restroom and its origins.
These questions mapped almost perfectly onto North Carolina’s eighth-grade science standards — water’s molecular makeup, the water cycle, the water table, evaporation and weather — and it grew into students tracing where the water in their own homes comes from, since Exploris draws students from five counties with different water sources.
Over the years, Exploris students have interviewed flood survivors from a nearby North Carolina town nearly wiped out by a hurricane and organized fundraising drives for water treatment plants overseas.
“Our kids are still getting opportunities for deep learning, but they’re doing it while being changemakers,” Deborah said.
Rebuilding the Network Herself
The students at charter schools aren’t the only ones who are given a fast track to growth.
Deborah said another advantage of charter leadership is that the path to administration is typically shorter and the schools tend to be smaller, which puts leaders in close working relationships early on. She credits Eric Grunden, the founding principal at Research Triangle High School, as an early mentor whose approach to building a school from scratch shaped how she’d later lead her own team.
Deborah is active within the North Carolina Association for Public Charter Schools and will serve as a keynote speaker during the organization’s annual conference in July. She also partners with the Leaders Building Leaders network, which includes a group of charter leaders who get on a call together every week.
Deborah joined the group during the pandemic and considers it invaluable for trading solutions in real time and asking questions like, “How are you solving for this?” and “What vendor are you using for that?”
She also believes that being a charter leader also means being a near-constant advocate, pushing back on misconceptions about the sector.
“I feel like I have to be a myth buster for charters,” she said.
A System Built for Access
Exploris became one of the first charter schools in North Carolina to adopt a voluntary weighted lottery, setting aside roughly 30% of seats for families who self-identify as economically disadvantaged.
Charter schools are frequently criticized for cherry picking students, and Deborah — who had found her way to Exploris as a parent with the time and resources to research her options — wanted to make sure all families had the same opportunities to discover Exploris.
“There is no admissions criteria beyond being a North Carolina resident,” Deborah said. “Your zip code is not your destiny.”
She is similarly open-minded when it comes to providing avenues for her fellow leaders at Exploris to grow. Deborah partnered with the Center for Teaching Quality to institute a five-person leadership team at the school — three directors alongside two teacher leaders representing the school’s elementary and middle school campuses — who sit at the table for any major decision.
“When they come to me with an idea, no matter how far-fetched, my number one goal is to figure out how I can say yes,” she said.