Keith Barron first stepped foot on Solid Ground School’s campus in 2019, and his passion for storytelling, play and creation soon followed to inspire families and students.
Solid Ground School, located at 13262 Liars Corner Road, is an educational institution cultivating a welcoming atmosphere through nature and outdoor learning.
Established in 2019, the “roots,” “shoots,” “saplings” and “branches” are used to define each pair of grade levels, starting with preschool and kindergarten all the way to fifth and sixth grade.
Each student is encouraged to explore “positive change at a local level” by getting involved with the Athens neighborhood. Solid Ground students not only learn about the fundamentals of nature but discover their personalities, experience risk and form friendships.
The curriculum is based on a student’s interests, previous experiences and skill level outdoors; fostering a “home-like school environment” with play and fun implemented during school days.
Jim Harris, director of annual giving at OU, said his daughter, Hazel Harris, started school at the Child Development Center, a learning lab for OU’s College of Education. It was not until the pandemic hit and Barron, a dedicated teacher of Hazel’s, moved to Solid Ground that Harris decided to make the switch.
“He invests in the kids themselves and wants to uplift them and validate them and their feelings, their ideas,” Harris said. “He wants to excite them. He really wants to draw out that passion from them and involve them in the process.”
Although leaving his 15-year position at the Development Center was unplanned, Barron took Solid Ground’s mission and curriculum to the next level, welcoming the school’s first storytelling project for pre-K and kindergarten students.
Barron said the Solid Ground founders, Christin Butler and Weston Lombard, opened the school after years of brainstorming and he was honored when they asked him to be the first teacher.
“When this opportunity came along, the way Christin and Weston described the school and their vision for it was kind of exactly my ideal school,” Barron said. “So to be able to be a part of this and help develop it and build it was just an opportunity where I was like, ‘Well, I’ve got to try this out.’”
Barron’s storytelling project, inspired by the Circle Round Podcast, transforms stories through music, drawings and dance. Similar to Barron’s classroom environment, every episode discusses topics including “kindness, persistence and generosity” and sparks meaningful conversations between children and adults.
Barron said he has always enjoyed collecting stories, so when he first listened to the podcast he was inspired by its message and innovative vision.
“My first or second year at the Child Development Center, I started telling stories and then getting the children to tell stories,” Barron said. “That aspect of my teaching has been there from the beginning of my time.”
Barron’s project took flight in Fall 2021 and has since grown. In 2024 his class wrote seven stories with titles ranging from “A Thankful Story” to “Nico and Sylvia Chase Garfield” to “Super Meanie Man Couldn’t Defeat the Roots.”
Writing these stories was just the first step of the project, as Barron also wanted to incorporate musical elements for dramatic effect. This past winter break, a team of seven composers from OU’s School of Music had the privilege of bringing the Solid Ground stories to life with musical sounds of excitement and adventure.
The musical masterminds included junior Zoe Daugherty, graduate students Andy Hernandez and Chih-Hsun Kao, sophomore Lydia Kress and freshmen Juliet Nei, Kieran Bakunas and Bennett Keyser. The group’s leader, Robert McClure, is a professor of composition theory and director of graduate studies for the School of Music.
Each composer was assigned one of the seven stories and McClure said most used a synthetic sound source or recorded their instruments.
“I thought it was a great opportunity for my students, my composers, to do something that they would almost never have a chance to do in regular curriculum,” McClure said.
McClure said the composers were free to experiment with different sounds and instruments, not only adding vibrance to the stories but also bringing a smile to the children’s faces.
“They got to be silly as composers … they are really supporting the ideas and the emotions in the story with music in a meaningful way,” McClure said.
Although the stories have yet to be released publicly, Solid Ground hopes the project will eventually expand into a larger program, as it has touched the lives of those at the music school, students and their families.
Barron said watching students flourish and showcase their personalities is every teacher’s goal.
“It gives me great joy because I think that by taking the time and encouraging children to share their stories is such an important and valuable thing that I can offer to them,” Barron said. “ … Everything we do can be a story.”
Further information regarding Solid Ground’s enrollment process, applications and curriculum can be found here.