From Mentorship to Tradition: Celebrating Student Success in South Bunnell as Bossardet Keeps 2018 Promise to Sugar Pop

The Bulldog Block Party that drew some 450 people on Nov. 19 at Bunnell’s Carver Gym was among the biggest yet as it not only celebrated students’ progress, but paid homage to the late Elijah “Sugar Pop” Emmanuel, who seven years ago extracted a key promise from Bobby Bossardet.

“He goes, you’re going to get your newspaper article and be done?” Emmanuel told Bossardet in the fall of 2018, the first time a block party was held. Bossardet had conceived of it when he was the new principal at Buddy Taylor Middle School. He’s been the Flagler Palm Coast High School principal since mid-2022. “He said, Are you going to keep coming out here, and are you going to do this again?”

“And I told him, I said: Pop, you have my word,” Bossardet recalled in a long, evocative interview this week. “As long as I’m a principal at a school, I said, we will always have a Bunnell Block Party and we’ll start the year off right. And we’ve lived up to it ever since.”

Bossardet has a way of talking as if every day is Thanksgiving. The event is fueled as if by his kind of positive energy.

The Nov. 19 party was the sixth (they skipped one during Covid), and the first without Emmanuel, who died in May. But Emmanuel’s name and memory rode high above the event, which is becoming as much of an institution as Emmanuel was. Students from Belle Terre Elementary, Buddy Taylor Middle School and FPC gathered to check their academic progress as they have at every fall block party, they got free ice cream, hamburgers and hotdogs thanks to the FPC Athletics Department, and they mingled with support services and afterschool groups.

“The Block party is always an amazing event,” Superintendent LaShakia Moore said. “I love that the focus is on academic success and beginning to have that conversation early. I believe this event also helps to instill bulldog pride into the young Bull Pups and Eagles in anticipation for them joining Flagler Palm Coast High School in the coming years.”

Moore singled out Bossardet: “Bobby is such a community-oriented leader. He is easily relatable to stakeholders and does a great job of highlighting and supporting the other leaders within our community,” the superintendent said. “True to their motto, he and his team are ‘setting the standard.’” His team this year included such key players as Bunnell Principal Carrie Presley and Katie Hansen, the principal at Buddy Taylor Middle School.

How and why all this started in 2018 has a lot to do with the mentorship mentality prevalent at the time, when Jim Tager was the superintendent. His leadership’s imprint persists: He was mentoring both Bossardet and Moore at the time, and predicted to this reporter, long before she got the title, that Moore would be a superintendent soon. Tager had placed great emphasis on lifting students from what academic lingo euphemizes as the “lowest quartile.”

Tager instituted various methods, from pushing principals to make 10 house visits a month to having students “lunch with the principal” to establishing “The Bunker,” a high school program targeted at the lower-performing students to help coach them to better success. It all paid off: the district was rated A in Tager’s last full year, the only time the district got an A in the last 13 years. Naturally, Tager was driven out in 2020 by a short-sighted board.

Tager had appointed Bossardet principal at Buddy Taylor (within weeks of his appointment of Moore as Rymfire Elementary’s principal), tasking him with shaping up that school out of its poor reputation.

Let Bossardet pick up the thread.

Keymarion Hall, whose life would end in a drive-by shooting in Bunnell when he was 16 (his assailant is serving 55 years in prison), was an 8th grader and one of Bossardet’s mentees. Keymarion was passing his classes, but barely, and he thought that was fine. Bossardet didn’t.

“Keymarion was a phenomenal basketball player, and I had him in my office, and I said, Keymarion–I looked at his grades–I said, this isn’t going to cut it,” Bossardet told him. Keymarion was to be promoted to FPC the next year, but he wouldn’t get to play basketball with those grades. “If you were at a high school right now, I said, you’d be ineligible. And I’ll never forget how disappointed he was that I shared that news with him.”

What Keymarion and many students hadn’t grasped was that their GPA dictated their opportunities and success in high school. They didn’t grasp it because they didn’t have access to their GPA. It wasn’t part of their portfolio in middle school, as it is in high school. Bossardet saw the issue, went to Louise Bossardet, a data quality coordinator who happened to be his sister-in-law, and asked her to find a way to incorporate GPA calculators in students’ Skyward accounts, the online portals enabling students, parents and teachers to be on the same data page. Louise had it done in 48 hours.

From then on, Buddy Taylor would do Friday grade checks. The goal was to push students to 2.0 and above.

“It was just an opportunity to be able to really highlight what their GPA was, understand it and also communicate with parents,” Bossardet said. But there were several neighborhoods from where it was difficult to get parents to come to the school, especially during business hours. So Bossardet decided to take the school to them.

That’s how the block party was born.

“Not only do we want to bring our school to Bunnell, but I want to invite some of the fifth and sixth graders from Bunnell Elementary School to see all the great things that we have happening over at BTMS,” Bossardet said, “and get them excited about wanting to become an Eagle instead of bypassing us and kind of going to Indian Trails.” At the time, 200 students zoned for Buddy Taylor were taking advantage of “school choice” and enrolling at Indian Trails Middle School instead, because of Buddy Taylor’s reputation. Bossardet was trying to break that cycle and return the school to its glory days.

The school’s reputation was in part the district’s doing: the school had a larger Black population, relative to the district’s population as a whole–17 percent compared to 13 percent in the district. Buddy Taylor had one Black employee, Ron Crowley. He was a janitor. He’d been there over 20 years. “I was blown away when I first got there,” Bossardet says. He put Crowley on his leadership team.

“You are the only African American male on this campus, and you’ve been here for the last 20-something years,” Bossardet told Crowley, who is a Bunnell resident. “I go, you’ve mentored more kids than I’ll ever mentor my entire life. I said, you know the kids that are going home to struggle in households. I said, you know the teachers that stay late, you know the kids that are hungry. I said, if I wasn’t bringing you to the table every time I made a decision, what kind of leader would I be?”

One of Bossardet’s first acts, to a bemused Crowley, was to break up the cafeteria’s prison-like seating system and “let kids sit where they want to sit,” a phrase Tager might recognize.

Bossardet then got to work on the block party. He pitched the idea to Marcus Sanfilippo, the principal at Bunnell Elementary, and Carrie Presley, then an assistant principal (she has since become the principal). “We’re going to have fun,” he told them, “we’re going to go out to the community. We’re going to bring our schools to them, and we’re going to celebrate our kids. So the idea behind the block party was, hey, we wanted to promote good grades, but we also wanted to inform families of all the supports that we had available, not just on our campus, but in the school district as well as the community.” Tager obviously was supportive. Emmanuel helped promote it.

The inaugural block party was held after the first nine weeks of school, after the first progress report came out. The Education Foundation’s Connect Bus was there (with the late Joe Rizzo of course), counselors were there to go over progress reports with students and parents (including the late Randi Fasnacht, who died of cancer in April). GPAs were calculated. Those who were at 2.0 or better got a yard sign. Those who were below 2.0 were told: “Just because you’re not doing well right now, we still have four and a half weeks. Come on into the gym, and let’s see what we can do.”

That was Carver Gym, where Bossardet and the other administrators had brought in youth organizations, churches, the African-American Mentor Program, the Ed Foundation’s Take Stock in Children, supports from the district’s Teaching and Learning Department with free books, the IB program, the robotics program, and others. The goal was to pair up struggling students with whatever resources would help them cross that 2.0 line.

“It was amazing. I mean, we had probably 300, 400 people,” Bossardet said, recalling the event as if it were the last. It was as if he was still riding the high of 2018, or had never descended from it. “We really didn’t know what to do. It was our first event. It was my first real community event as a principal. But it was a huge, huge success. And to see the kids that lived in Bunnell who went to Buddy Taylor take so much pride in the actual event. I mean, they had their grandparents, their aunts, their uncles, their cousins, walking over to the community center, and they’re in there serving the food, and they’re in there introducing them to teachers and stuff like that. It was amazing.”

Late that night as Bossardet was among the last in the building, cleaning up, he went to his car, started driving, “and you know what, “I took a right instead of a left.”

A left would have been to U.S. 1 and north to Palm Coast. A right was to South Bunnell.

“I drove through the neighborhood,” he said. “There must have been 40 to 50 yard signs in the middle of the projects at Bunnell. And I was like–I just smile, just talking about it. Because, you know, sometimes you don’t hear about all the positive things that do come out of Bunnell. Sometimes you only hear about the crime. Sometimes you only hear about some of the negative things. And I’ll never forget driving through there going, you know what? If you didn’t know about this town, and you drove through tonight and you saw the number of yard signs and the number of kids that are on track to graduate no matter what grade they’re in, I think you’d have a different perception of what that town means to everybody.”

So it was last Wednesday.