Tea Girls going to see Hell’s Kitchen on Broadway in New York this past Saturday. (Photo: E. Marie Lambert)
E. Marie Lambert didn’t know when she started subbing at Mastery Pickett School that she would end up being a front desk fixer.
And she certainly didn’t know that she would start an afterschool program that would become one of the most popular at the school – the Spilling the Tea mentoring program, for middle school and high school girls.
Lambert is a retired preschool teacher and founder of the True Way Youth Empowerment Foundation, an organization designed to empower young people and show them possibilities in work and life through workshops and conferences.
She ended up at the sixth through 12th grade charter school by serving as the building substitute throughout the entire school.
After getting to know the students and staff, the school community wanted her to stay on, even when COVID-19 shut down in-person education. So, she began doing administrative work, and when the school reopened, she joined their front desk staff.
Lambert can say with confidence that it is where she shines.
She loves turning people’s bad days into something good, whether it’s students coming to the office with conflicts or parents stopping by already angry about specific issues. She says she tries to approach each person with kindness, to really hear and see them, and validate their stress and emotions.
And it became her way of becoming a strong part of the school’s community – strong enough to create an after-school program to address a specific challenge.
Starting Spilling the Tea
It was around 2022, when schools were back in person, and Lambert was working at the front desk, where she noticed that many of the younger middle school girls were being suspended for fighting, bullying, and other behaviors.
The school asked if she wanted to do some kind of after-school program, and she agreed. She desired to take only the girls, whom she observed had some of the biggest tensions at school.
They issued a call for the new group, and 55 girls expressed interest. By the end of that first semester, they had already established a core group of 35 girls attending the twice-weekly after-school program.
The most popular extracurricular program (besides sports)
Mr. Sam Morrison, a 12th-grade special education teacher, is also the extracurriculars supervisor at the school.
Morrison says the most impressive part of Spilling the Tea is the high attendance and the fact that the girls keep coming back every session, twice a week, week after week. He says it is very hard to engage teenage students.
So what keeps them interested? According to Morrison, Lambert’s planning and creating of entertaining content.
“She puts out an amazing product, content that is relevant to the students. They derive a lot of benefits from being part of the group,” says Morrison.
He continues, “ It’s a mentoring group, so she’s teaching them to be the best versions of themselves. Not all teens are necessarily engaged by that type of content, but she makes it engaging for them, which is amazing.”
Lambert also says consistency is what keeps the group strong.
They meet every Tuesday and Thursday at 3:30 p.m., and you can’t come in after 3:40 p.m. She shows up every session, even when she had to take her husband, who is disabled, with her one day.
She knows that it’s modeling behavior she wants to see in the girls, but it also instills trust in them. The girls know she will be there for them no matter what.
So what do they do?
Typically, the group starts with an icebreaker, where Lambert will tell the girls to line up according to their grade or last name.
The program started with just the sixth, seventh, and eighth-grade girls, but now her older girls are in 10th grade and have come back as “big sisters”.
Then they share their “peaks and valleys”– a highlight of their day and a challenging part of their day.
Sometimes it’s a failed math test. Sometimes it’s relationship problems. The girls start offering solutions to each other – you should ask the teacher after class for more help with math, or ask another girl offering to help during lunchtime.
Lambert gets all the girls to sign a waiver at the beginning of the year that says, “What happens in Tea Girls, stays in Tea Girls.”
Unless something dangerous is said and Lambert has the duty to report it, which she will inform them of, the students keep what is said within the group.
Discussions can get deep. Lambert says many of the girls are in relationships, with boys or girls, and she talks about respecting their bodies and ensuring others respect their bodies and feelings, too.
And they always recite their Tea Girl mantra. It’s about three minutes long and talks about accepting who they are and supporting their sisters. A phrase from the mantra Lambert uses a lot is “I enter relationships with the respect I’d like to receive.”
She tries to model it for the girls in the group and asks them to reflect on whether they are demonstrating respect for others.
They have hosted guest speakers, initiated a pen pal program with girls in Uganda, and even taken significant trips to Washington, D.C., and New York.
But sometimes it’s just the girls working on a large puzzle together, Lambert cheering them on, letting them know they are all pieces of that puzzle, and it works when they’re together.
Why it matters
Lambert has one activity where some girls leave the room, and when they return, the other girls start applauding and cheering for them, “like they are Beyoncè.”
Sometimes it is awkward for them to take in all the cheering. Lambert says this is something she continues to do because she wants them to experience what it is like to support one another instead of tearing each other down.
Khylei Byrd, a 15-year-old 10th grader at Mastery Pickett, remembers seventh grade as being full of suspensions for arguing and fighting.
And why all the fighting?
“Drama. And being messy.”
She adds, “I always wanted to be there, recording (the fights).”
Byrd remembers Ms. Lambert asking her to be part of the Tea Girls. She’s been a part of the group ever since. Now, she loves mentoring the younger girls.
She hasn’t been suspended for three years. Byrd runs track and cheers for the school, and she doesn’t want to put either of those activities in jeopardy.
She thinks of Ms. Lambert as her “school grandmom.”
“She always puts me in my place. She always gets me together, even when I was constantly getting suspended. Like, she always tells me stuff like stop being in trouble when you shouldn’t be doing that, you shouldn’t be doing that. And she’ll always tell me right from wrong.”
Lambert knows it’s the little details that make the students feel special – candy or a little snack, a hug, or even just taking a minute to listen to a conversation when the teens are having a hard day.
“I pay attention, and especially to kids who are either sliding under the radar or they seem like they’re not noticed. I try to make sure every kid is seen and heard. And it’s not just with my Tea Girls, but Tea Girls need that especially,” says Lambert.
It makes a difference.
Mr. Morrison hasn’t directly engaged with the students from Spilling the Tea, but he’s heard from other teachers about the changes they’ve noticed.
“I think that’s common when you’re able to engage kids in an after-school program like that and they feel part of the community, it just spills over into kind of everything,” says Morrison.
He continues, “They just feel more like they’re just part of everything, and it helps boost their self-image and their feelings about school. I think that’s why there’s such a push for kids to engage in things like extracurricular activities.”
The tricky part, he says, is finding adults who can engage kids like Lambert does.
Lambert is really proud of the program and her students, and one of the most powerful things is seeing how her older girls are now becoming models in school in ways they never had before.
The girls feel like they are part of a community, and many of them wear their Spilling the Tea girls’ shirts proudly. They start looking out for each other, and sometimes they even hold other Tea Girls accountable if they see them being mean or talking badly in school.
For Byrd, she keeps coming back because she likes looking out for the other girls.
“I never really noticed how many kids were going through the same stuff I was going through,” Byrd said.
For Lambert, she would love to see a Spilling the Tea Girls chapter in every school in the city, even a “Global Spilling the Tea Girls.”
She says you wouldn’t have to look a certain way or be a certain thing. Just be who you are, and come together to share stories and sisterhood.