The South Carolina Elementary Teacher Whose Hand-Built Creative Story Theater Has Become a National Conversation

Sometimes you forget about a classroom as soon as you leave it. Sometimes a classroom will stick with you for years, even longer. The one Damon Qualls built in Greenville, South Carolina, seems to be in the second group, and these days it’s not just his students who think this way.

As an elementary school teacher, Qualls built a story theater in his classroom by hand. Not in a figurative way. With real tools, real work, and probably a fair amount of time that could have been better spent on something much easier. The building turned into a place where his students could act out stories, imagine, and do the kind of slow, unhurried creative work that is getting harder to find in schools that are focused on standards and test scores.

In the spring of 2015, Qualls’ classroom was chosen for a “flash-funding” event put together by DonorsChoose, a nonprofit that helps public school teachers find donors who can fund projects in their classrooms. At the time, Stephen Colbert was getting ready to take over CBS’s Late Show. He used the reason to bring attention to teachers in South Carolina. It looked like the state had never had one of these “flash funding” events before, where all the teacher projects in a region get money at the same time. Qualls was the teacher who was picked to hear the news in person.

There’s a good chance that this story will become too sentimental. But what makes it stick is how specific it is about what Qualls built. Not like a bulletin board or a reading nook with some throw pillows. A story theater is different. Children will feel like they’re in a different place as soon as they walk through that space because it was built with that in mind. It feels very old-fashioned, with its use of wood and imagination in a time when schools are more likely to put in smartboards than stages.

It’s interesting that this story came up again recently, this time on social media and getting new attention more than ten years after it happened. That level of durability isn’t by chance. People are interested in it because it shows something that is really hard to find: a teacher who didn’t wait for a budget, a grant, or approval from the administration. He made it all by himself.

A bigger discussion is going on right now about what creativity looks like in public schools and whether the systems that support teachers encourage it or quietly stop it. That tension is right there in Qualls’ theater. His project may have gone viral not just because of the theater, but also because of the picture of a teacher who did everything possible to give kids something real.

Most of the time, elementary school teachers don’t make the national news. Most of the time, when they do, it’s for a dramatic or sad reason. One man’s work on a small wooden stage in Greenville, South Carolina, became a real moment of national conversation. Now that’s something else. It seems to say that people are looking for examples of quiet, unglamorous service that doesn’t look for praise until it gets it anyway.

He didn’t mean to become a symbol of anything, but he did. He wanted to make a better spot for his students to tell stories. Still not sure if the attention from people all over the country changes anything in his classroom or anyone else’s. It looks like the theater is still there, though. The stories keep going.