The Redhound Service Award Critical Thinking Winner, Ashley Hart

Sometimes, the hardest part of helping a student isn't knowing what to do. It's figuring out how to do it when the path forward isn't clear.

At Corbin Elementary School & Corbin School of Innovation, Ashley Hart, Family Resource Youth Service Center Coordinator, has built her work around answering that question.

Ashley was recently recognized with the Redhound Way Service Award for Critical Thinking during our Classified Appreciation Breakfast. The award celebrates classified employees who bring the traits of The Redhound Way to life through their daily work and service to others.

For Ashley, critical thinking begins with refusing to accept that a difficult circumstance has to become a student's future.

Every day, Ashley works to understand the challenges affecting her students and families—from homelessness and medical needs to family changes, transiency, and mental health concerns. She doesn't simply identify a problem. She asks questions, brings people together, searches for solutions, and keeps going until she finds a way forward.

One student this year showed exactly what that looks like.

The student was experiencing homelessness, significant family hardship, and a serious medical diagnosis requiring specialized care. Ashley immediately began working with the family, teachers, administrators, and transportation staff to understand what the student needed.

Then she started connecting the pieces.

Ashley worked with local shelters and district transportation to develop a plan that allowed the student and a parent to stay in a shelter in a nearby county while still providing transportation to Corbin schools each day.

But perhaps the most important problem Ashley helped solve wasn't transportation or housing.

It was hope.

The student's parents had experienced so much hardship that they sometimes questioned their own ability to provide for their child. Ashley didn't see them through the lens of their circumstances. She saw their potential.

She stayed connected. She checked on the student. She reached out when the student was absent. She listened when the family shared difficult things. And, most importantly, she kept reminding them that they were capable of creating stability for their child.

Over time, a family who might have struggled to trust others came to trust Ashley completely.

That is the power of critical thinking when it is paired with compassion.

Ashley approaches every challenge with the same mindset: What is standing in this student's way, and what can we do about it?

She brings together teachers, counselors, administrators, families, and community partners. She finds resources. She makes phone calls. She visits homes. She follows up. She keeps looking for another possibility when the first solution doesn't work.

And she does it without asking, Whose responsibility is this?

Instead, Ashley asks, “What else can we do to help this child succeed?”

Her work reminds us that critical thinking isn't simply solving problems. Sometimes, it means looking at a situation everyone else sees as impossible and believing there is still a way forward.

Ashley Hart doesn't just find solutions. She helps students and families believe that better possibilities exist—and then she gets to work helping them reach them.

That is The Redhound Way.