March 17, 2025 | Meghan Parsche

Dr. Tina Owen-Moore: teaching a path to peace

Dr. Owen-Moore has dedicated her career to creating safe, welcoming and nurturing spaces for all students.

Dr. Tina Owen-Moore

"I wanted kids to know that their stories would always be safe with me."

As a lifelong educator, Dr. Tina Owen-Moore has seen her fair share of bullying. Heartbroken to see bright, promising students—many who identified as LGBTQ—dropping out of school or committing suicide from being bullied, she came up with a radical idea.

In 2005, she founded the Alliance School in Milwaukee, the first in the nation created with the specific purpose of being bully free.

It was a simple assignment: write about your family.

So that’s what Tina did.

Taking it as an opportunity to speak her truth, the high school freshman put it all to paper: a father in jail, family problems and all the challenges that come with growing up poor. Her teacher’s response—a lecture that her lived experiences weren’t appropriate subject matter for a school paper—shocked and embarrassed her.

The experience was the catalyst for Dr. Owen-Moore’s fierce determination to create caring spaces within education that welcome, nurture, and protect all students.

This determination inspired her to found and lead The Alliance School, a charter school within Milwaukee Public Schools that opened in 2005 with a mission of reducing bullying by providing a safe, inclusive and academically-challenging environment for all students.

Early Life and Education

A self-described “military brat,” Dr. Owen-Moore moved several times throughout her childhood before coming to Milwaukee at 19 years old.

Although she knew she wanted to go to college, the odds seemed stacked against her.

When Dr. Owen-Moore, then a teen mom with a difficult upbringing and a GED, walked into the Marquette campus in 1994, she admits that she knew very little about school.

She eventually found her way, initially intending to study law.

But the memory of that English class her freshman year had stuck with Dr. Owen-Moore, and she decided to major in English and secondary education.

“By becoming an English teacher, I hoped to help kids like me. I wanted kids to know that their stories would always be safe with me,” she says.

Against all odds, Dr. Owen-Moore graduated with her bachelor’s degree in 1998 and later went on to earn a Master of Arts in Administrative Leadership and Director of Instruction from Alverno College and a Doctor of Education Leadership (Ed.L.D.) from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

The fall after graduating from Marquette, Dr. Owen-Moore started her first job as an English teacher at Washington High School in Milwaukee.

She noticed a lot of bullying happening at the school—of LGBTQ students, kids with disabilities and many others. It was a widespread problem, with many of the bullied were dropping out of school. Some were committing suicide.

“So many of the kids dropping out were very talented, bright kids. But school had become such an unwelcoming environment that they no longer felt safe there,” she recalls.

In response, Dr. Owen-Moore helped students establish the school’s first Gay Straight Alliance, a student-led organization that provides a safe and supportive environment for LGBTQ students and their allies.

She also used her position as an English teacher to promote acceptance and understanding among her students.

In a 2017 interview in The Christian Science Monitor, Dr. Owen-Moore described an activity she did with students.

“I gave them all shreds of paper and said, ‘Write down everything in your life that you’ve been through that’s hard.’ I had them throw [the shreds] into a big box and I had each one grab a handful and create a collage so they could read them. They were shocked to [read things like], ‘My brother’s in a gang,’ or ‘I had a miscarriage.’”

She describes it as an emotional class, after which she noticed more care and respect among her students.

She says that lesson became the cornerstone of The Alliance School’s future philosophy and her work going forward: “How can we build connections so that people get to know each other so well that they are not likely to do harm?”

With drop-out, homelessness and suicide rates high among LGBTQ youth, more needed to be done to help students. Bullying was not going away and without enough pressure for change, the problem needed a more immediate solution.

Dr. Owen-Moore had heard about the success of the Harvey Milk High School in New York City, which became a fully-accredited public school in 2003 and was the nation’s first public school established to “meet the needs of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning students and others in crisis.”

In 2003, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced a $22 million investment in the NewSchools Venture Fund to increase the number of high-quality charter schools around the country.

The goal was to raise graduation rates and give all students access to an array of high-quality educational options.

Dr. Owen-Moore knew it was the perfect time to take action.

The Alliance School

With the help of a grant from the NewSchools Venture Fund and the support of the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) Board of Education, Dr. Owen-Moore founded The Alliance School in 2005.

Not wanting to limit its scope to LGBTQ kids, the school was created around an anti-bullying and acceptance focus for grades 9-12.

The Alliance School was established as a teacher-led school with a democratic model for all decision-making.

Students vote on everything from consequences for breaking school rules to whether to allow visits from the media.

The school’s culture of acceptance was built by adopting the United Nations’ philosophy for creating peace. The philosophy focuses on peacebuilding, which in the case of The Alliance School meant creating opportunities for students to really get to know each other.

“Most schools spend time on peacemaking and peacekeeping, but not enough time on the peacebuilding part,” explains Dr. Owen-Moore.

“My belief is if you get kids to know each other well and see themselves in others, they’re less likely to harm one another.”

Being explicit about their mission of acceptance made a difference.

For example, during Dr. Owen-Moore’s tenure, the school had several autistic students who had been bullied at other schools. The Alliance School fostered understanding by teaching students about autism and how it affects the way those on the spectrum experience the world.

Students were taught about different cultures in an environment where ethnic differences were embraced and celebrated. Educators helped to foster understanding internally and externally by hosting workshops and presenting at community events.

Not surprisingly, the school had its fair share of detractors. Some called The Alliance School segregationist, concerned that removing bullied kids from a traditional educational setting would do more harm than good.

“Unfortunately, so much of the response to bullying was, ‘It’ll always be there,’ or the idea that if the student who was being bullied could change, then they wouldn’t be bullied. I really felt strongly that it was our responsibility to make sure that schools are safe and accepting for all students,” Dr. Owen-Moore says.

Anti-gay groups felt the establishment of the school signaled approval of the LGBTQ lifestyle and worried that the school would “teach students to be gay.”

In the school’s early days, Christian protestors demonstrated outside the school, some carrying signs with less-than-kind messages, even targeting Dr. Owen-Moore directly for being a lesbian.

In response, she invited the protestors to talk about their own experiences being bullied in school. To anyone who shared a story, Dr. Owen-Moore responded, “I would protect you too.”

The message resonated with protestors, who could only agree that hurting another person over differences in beliefs was never okay—the very reason the school was founded.

As a testament to the school’s success, Dr. Owen-Moore likes to share a story of a straight-identifying student who enrolled at The Alliance School—by accident.

“After realizing his mistake, he initially wanted to leave,” she remembers. “But within maybe 20 minutes in our school, he had changed his mind. He realized he was in a caring, comfortable space.”

Spreading the Community of Love Philosophy

Dr. Owen-Moore made the difficult decision to leave The Alliance School in 2016 to pursue her doctoral degree at Harvard.

“They [her Alliance colleagues] knew how to do it well. I knew it was time to spread the Alliance mission and make sure more schools could be safe and inclusive places for all kids,” she says.

In each new role she has taken on since, including Chief People Officer for Chicago International Charter School, Superintendent for the School District of Cudahy, and most recently, as Board Clerk for the MPS Board of Governance, she shares her passion for teacher leadership and creating school environments that welcome, nurture, and protect all students.

In 2019, Dr. Owen-Moore published The Alliance Way: The Making of a Bully-Free School, which details the school’s beliefs and practices and provides tools for educators to create change at their own schools.

Dr. Owen-Moore was one of the co-founders of the Teacher Led Network, a collaborative for teacher leaders to advocate for the needs of teacher-led schools, collaborate around best practices, and share resources.

In 2009, she and her co-founders were recognized with the Innovator of the Year Award by the Wisconsin Charter Schools Association.

Her groundbreaking work has been recognized with numerous honors and awards including the Wisconsin Gay Straight Alliance for Safe Schools’ Educator of the Year Award in 2010. The Alliance School was honored with Wisconsin Charter School of the Year awards in 2009 and 2011 and was named one of 41 most innovative schools in the country by Noodle.com in 2015.

Dr. Owen-Moore credits mentors she had early in her teaching career for encouraging and inspiring her, including Marty Lexmond who helped with all of the details of starting The Alliance School and served as a mentor for several Alliance students.

She says she is thankful for the support of Dr. Gary Hollander, founder of Diverse & Resilient, and board member Brenda Coley, who she says were supportive and involved in the early days of Alliance, recommending students, hosting workshops, and for being great friends and community partners.

“I would also like to share gratitude for the entire Alliance staff and all of the students who took a chance on this vision,” she adds.

“Keep Working”

Today, Dr. Owen-Moore lives in the Milwaukee area with her wife, Velvet, and their two cats, Juani and Tiger, and their cavapoo, Hugsee. She has two grown children, Felicia and Jeremy, who she proudly reports chose to attend The Alliance School and are happy and successful graduates.

Former students still reach out to thank her and share the difference that the school made in their lives and how they continue to use the unique skills they learned there.

It’s in these young people and the ripples The Alliance School continues to make that Dr. Owen-Moore finds hope for the future.

“It’s a really hard time for the LGBTQ community, but we’ve been here before,” she says. “We need to keep working and promoting the things we know will make a difference, like creating safe spaces that kids need to succeed.”