Anne Coleman Chambers

Anne Coleman Chambers was born Anne Coleman in Baltimore, Maryland, to Tracy Coleman Sr., owner of a construction company in Silver Spring, and Virginia Coleman. Coleman Chambers was raised in Colesville, Maryland and attended Sherwood High School in Sandy Spring. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Maryland, College Park, before becoming a teacher in the Prince George’s County, Maryland, public school system in 1963.[1][2]

While teaching and counseling in the Prince George's County public school system, Coleman Chambers grew frustrated with what she viewed as excess bureaucracy, class sizes that were too large, and students reaching high school with insufficient reading and math preparation.[2] As a result, she cofounded Indian Creek School in 1973 with Rebecca Randolph, another Prince George's County public school teacher, and her brother, Tracy "Punky" Coleman, Jr., with 33 original students in pre-K, kindergarten, and first grade.[1] The school began with four teachers.[3] Coleman Chambers became the first headmistress of Indian Creek School, a role she would fill until 2010, and Randolph served as Assistant Director, later becoming principal of the Indian Creek Lower School.[4]

Coleman Chamber's parents donated land for the new school and covered the mortgage payments the first year, and Tracy Coleman, Jr. was involved in the school's construction on a 17-acre campus on Evergreen Road in Crownsville, Maryland, near Annapolis. Tracy Coleman, Jr. would also serve as Indian Creek School's first Director of Transportation and Physical Plant. Indian Creek School had an initial operating budget of $40,000.[2][4]

In 1977, Indian Creek added a middle school, increasing enrollment to 184. By 1977, the school had four buildings, six buses, 22 staff members, and a budget of $250,000.[2][5] The middle school graduated its first eighth-grade class in 1979, and by 1981, enrollment at Indian Creek School had increased to 230 students.[6][7]

Coleman Chambers was a longtime friend of Dr. Jane R. Snider, an educator who in 1982 founded a consulting practice in Annapolis working with children facing difficulties in learning to read. When Snider, who founded the Summit School, another private school in Maryland, at first encountered problems obtaining county government approval, Coleman Chambers let her open the school in trailers on three acres of land behind Indian Creek. Summit School later moved to Upper Marlboro and then, in 1995, to its current location in Edgewater, Maryland.[1]

In 1983, beginning with the class of 1993, class size was doubled, to 40 students per grade.[4]

In 1993, a board of trustees was established and received ownership of the school to facilitate future institutional growth.[4]

Indian Creek's Evergreen Campus building gradually expanded, from about 5,000 square feet of space in 1973, to about 80,000 square feet by the start of the 2000s.[6] This included a doubling of space in 1998, as Alumni Hall, locker rooms, and fourteen classrooms were added.[4] With a staff of over 100, Indian Creek School was by 2004 one of the largest employers in Crownsville.[3]

Sign at Indian Creek Upper School Campus entrance

Indian Creek's first high school class began in August 2004, with 16 students occupying one room on the Lower and Middle School campus. Coleman Chambers did not originally plan to found a high school, focusing instead on pre-K through eight-grade students. However, eight-graders leaving Indian Creek often found it difficult to find the right high school, and many parents wanted an Indian Creek high school, believing there to be no high school in the area with a similar educational philosophy.[8][6] Population growth in Anne Arundel County first made this expansion feasible in the early 2000s.[3] The first high school class moved to vacant space at the Crownsville Hospital Center in October 2004.[9]

Anne Chambers Way street sign in Crownsville

In 2004, Indian Creek School began construction of a $17 million, 96,000-square-foot Upper School building on a second campus in Crownsville, five miles away from the original campus.[6] The site of the new campus, at 114 acres, was once a tobacco farm owned by the Durner family, a portion of which was set aside for conservation.[10] Indian Creek's high school students moved to the new campus in September 2006, and the school graduated its first high school class, of 29 students, in 2008.[9] A road constructed to provide access to the new Upper School building was named after Coleman Chambers; its street address is 1500 Anne Chambers Way.[3]

Eileen Mattingly served as the first Upper School Head until 2009, when she stepped down to teach in the humanities. After a national search, she was succeeded by Gerard Connolly, who had previously served as head of Severn Upper School in Severna Park, Maryland and had worked to establish a charter school in Washington, D.C. In 2009, the Indian Creek Upper School had 170 students.

Lower School Head and Indian Creek cofounder Rebbecca Randolph retired in 2007.[4] In spring 2010, Coleman Chambers stepped down as headmistress of Indian Creek School, after more than 37 years in that role.[11] She taught psychology and human development at the Indian Creek Upper School, which then had 184 students, for one year before retiring in 2011.[4][11]

Coleman Chambers and Randolph based Indian Creek School's educational approach on research in neuroscience and cognitive development. In 2001, the school began working with All Kinds of Minds, an education research nonprofit. Since then, the school has trained its teachers in the All Kinds of Minds, neuroscience-based program, which focuses on understanding different learning styles and promoting collaboration between students, parents, and teachers. As part of the approach, students have a different teacher for each subject, and a learner profile is developed for each student as they progress each year.[12][13]

At the Indian Creek Middle School, Coleman Chambers created extended day-care into the early evening, before this existed at many other schools, after research indicated it was healthy for students.[5] At the Upper School, she scheduled the school day to take place from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., to best match the circadian rhythms of teenage students and support intellectual and emotional development.[4][3]

Coleman Chambers developed a human development curriculum influenced by research in developmental psychology and addressing topics including civil discourse, emotional maturatity, drugs, sexuality, and external influences on students as they grow up. The program was also designed to support different children's different needs. After establishing human development education at Indian Creek, Coleman Chambers also helped develop the human development program at Severn School.[5]

In 2001, Coleman Chambers established a free, three-week summer day camp called Students Taking Academic Responsibility, or STARs, for disadvantaged middle school-aged kids in the Annapolis area, including from Annapolis's public housing communities. Coleman Chambers saw the camp as part of Indian Creek School's mission of giving back to the local community, particularly wanting to help kids who could otherwise be missed in large classroom settings. In the camp's human development classes, campers discussed decision-making, college, and challenges facing kids their age. After starting with about 20 campers in 2001, by 2010 there were 56 campers, and STARs had moved to the Indian Creek Upper School campus. For the first time, in 2010, donations paid for the program, which was previously paid for by the school. STARs also began offering scholarships to Indian Creek School to some campers; full tuition in that year was $21,000. Former Indian Creek School student Will Bartz became involved with STARs in 2005, after leaving his job as a financial adviser, where he had grown unsatisfied, and returning to Coleman Chambers for advice. By 2010, Bartz had become director of the STARs program, also teaching math and coaching basketball at Indian Creek.[14]

Under Coleman Chambers, a "Character Counts" program was developed at the Indian Creek Lower School to impart values including respect, kindness, honesty, and responsibility, while middle school students began starting each year with fall camping trips, designed to promote team-building and student-faculty interaction.[15]

In an interview with The Baltimore Sun in 1981, Coleman Chambers distinguished Indian Creek School from more college preparatory-focused primary schools in valuing a wide variety of student goals and interests. She noted that preschool students were admitted on a first-come, first-serve basis, rather than based on test results.[16]

Under Coleman Chambers and Randolph, Indian Creek School began teaching Spanish and computer classes, starting at the kindergarten level, before this was common.[17] Indian Creek also developed a focus on project-based learning, believing it to improve knowledge retention.[18] In 2014, the school established a program called Blended Learning at Indian Creek, or BLinc, in which faculty offer supplemental courses with some in-person teaching and some online, asynchronous components. Beginning with only two summer courses, the BLinc program expanded to 22 courses offered year-round in 2016.[19]

Coleman Chambers was a longstanding singer with the Annapolis Chorale, contributing to her support of the arts at Indian Creek School.[5]

Coleman Chambers had one son, Kenny, from a marriage with Bill Chambers, which ended in divorce. She died on October 12, 2020 at the age of 80, in Hagerstown, Maryland.[1]

• Educational Psychology
• Free school movement
• Indian Creek School
• Schools Attuned

• Indian Creek School