Welcome to our family!
Director & Lead Educator, Jessica DiLorenzo McHugh
Wholehearted Schoolhouse is led by Jessica DiLorenzo McHugh. She holds a Master of Education degree in Early Childhood and Elementary as well as a Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology and Theater Arts from Rutgers University, New Jersey.
She received extensive training in Project Based Learning and The Reggio Emilia Approach to Early Childhood Education through The Caldwell Collaborative. She has been joyfully integrating the arts and facilitating Project-Based Learning in classrooms since 2006, and she’s led professional development for teachers and school leaders since 2013.
In 2019, she was a recipient of the Leadership in Arts Education Award from The Arts and Cultural Alliance of Sarasota County. She has served as the Arts Integration Specialist for Any Given Child Sarasota, she's a national consultant, and a coach and mentor to educators, teaching artists and school leaders across the nation.
Jessica‘s mission is to nurture a lifelong passion for learning in each student and educator and to empower them to explore the boundless possibilities of their innate creativity. She is a loving mama to Leo and Luna, and a devoted wife to Martin McHugh, who is a firefighter/paramedic in Sarasota, FL.
We welcome you to a nurturing and dynamic learning community that fosters a love for exploration, collaboration, and self-expression.
“Creativity becomes more visible when adults try to be more attentive to the cognitive processes of children than to the results they achieve in various fields of doing and understanding.”
— Loris Malaguzzi
