Hometown: St. Mary’s County, MD

Current Program: Urban Education Policy

Undergraduate Institution: Penn State University

Undergraduate Degree (+ any other previous degrees): Secondary Education

(TFA Alum (DC ‘15), taught Middle School Special Education for 6 years)

What drew you to the UEP program?

I had been previously enrolled in an education policy program in Washington, DC when I taught in Virginia. I paused my graduate study then to focus on teaching and family. When life brought me to Providence, I started searching for education policy programs so that I could restart my graduate education. Not only did Brown have an education policy program, they focused on urban education where I spent four of my six years of teaching. After having an unsure start to graduate school, reading about the classes and the internship made me feel more than optimistic about what my future in education policy would look like. 

What has been your favorite class (or experience) at Brown and why?

Tough question. Our current class with Professor Chaney (Race & Democracy) is definitely one of the top classes on my list. The depth of discussion has class ending before we even realize we got started. I love hearing the perspectives of my classmates and learning the history of how ideologies and race have impacted education. I will add that being able to have an elective class was an opportunity I did not expect to have such an impact on me. I took a class taught by Professor Qazilbash that had undergraduate students and we learned about teaching and teaching policy in the United States. Hearing what students who, in theory, I could have taught at some point share their thoughts and assumptions about teaching was a fantastic experience.

Where is your internship and what are you working on?

This is a fun question. I’ve had what I would call a “journeyman’s” internship experience in my internship with PPSD. I got to experience the effects of turnover at an urban school district currently taken over by the state. I began my year working with the Office of Equity and Diversity on their efforts to enhance gender inclusion within PPSD programming and operations. I created surveys for district stakeholders as well as wrote a grant to create a Gender Expansive Policy steering committee made up of various members of the district and community. That experience was limited by the transition of my supervisor out of her role with PPSD. Since then, I have had the pleasure of working with both Human Resources and Special Education. I reached out to candidates who filled out applications to work in PPSD mid year and connected candidates with specific members of HR to answer questions. With Special Education, I coded and disseminated themes from a survey of special education teachers and their input about how their school was operating this year in terms of special education. Those results were shared with special education managers across all levels. Recently, I compiled research based interventions for possible future spending and created a spreadsheet of staffing opportunities for special education vacancies to better understand school staffing needs.

What are you hoping to do after graduation?

One thing about education is that it makes you a little bit of a crazy person. It helps with the getting up each day and doing the work. I hope to be working at PPSD (or another district) after I graduate. I want to continue what I have learned and take that into my next education position. Most frustrations (including my own) teachers have about people who work in district offices are their perceived memory loss of what day to day is like for a teacher. My goal is to keep that at the front of my mind. There is a part of me that is interested in taking my next experience and using it to launch into a doctoral program focusing on teacher preparation, supporting teacher growth, or something along those lines.