My parents came to the United States from West Africa in search of two things: academic freedom and religious freedom. They believed, as so many immigrants do, that this country would give their children opportunities that would have been out of reach at home. They were right about that. But the path to that opportunity was harder than it should have been, and it shaped everything about who I became.
Both of my parents spoke with a heavy Yoruba accent. When they went to school for parent-teacher conferences, genuinely wanting to understand how to support me, showing up because they cared, they were often met with impatience, sometimes outright dismissal, because English was not their first language. I watched them try to advocate for their child in rooms that were not built to hear them. My mother was extremely frustrated by it. My father decided to push through anyway.
Here is what I need people to understand about my parents: even though they were frustrated, they poured everything into what happened before I ever walked through the school doors. My homework was done. My uniform was pressed. My reading was practiced. I was prepared, every single day, because two people who were made to feel unwelcome in a school building were determined that it would never show up in their child's preparation. They authored my success from the kitchen table, even when they weren't invited to author it from the classroom.
I tell this story because it explains something people might not expect: becoming a teacher was not my early dream. I had watched what schools could do to families who didn't fit an expected mold, and for a long time, education was not where I saw myself.
What Changed My Mind
Before I became a teacher, I worked as a caseworker for children in foster care. Part of that job meant visiting schools regularly to check in on the students I was responsible for. What I saw in those visits has stayed with me for my entire career.
These were children who moved constantly, from home to home, sometimes from school to school within the same year. I watched them lose something with every move that was harder to see than a missing transcript or a gap in records: they were losing hope. Losing the sense that any place was truly theirs. Losing the belief that stability, and the people who might provide it, would stay.
I remember thinking, over and over, that what these students needed most was not one more adult managing their case. They needed someone determined to help restore what moving had taken from them, a sense of home, even inside a school building. That conviction is what turned me toward the classroom. I decided, right there, that I would become a teacher.
While my mother was making her heavenly transition, she reminded me that she and my father had come to the United States for academic and religious freedom. She held a master's degree, and she needed me to get a terminal degree. I promised her I would. I kept that promise when I earned my doctorate in Educational Leadership.
Where It Began
I started my teaching career as a kindergarten teacher in Blue Island, Illinois. From there, my career took me through nearly every level of instruction there is to teach, including graduate-level courses and college courses taught behind bars. Each setting taught me something different about what it means to reach a learner wherever they are, but the throughline was always the same: the belief that every student is capable of learning, if we are willing to teach them the way they actually learn.
I've carried a phrase with me throughout my career: if students do not learn the way we teach, we must teach the way they learn, and educate them as though it is impossible for them to fail. That is not a slogan for me. It's the practical standard I hold myself and every educator I've worked with to.
Building on That Belief
As a School Improvement Officer supporting 14 elementary schools in the Kent School District, I had the privilege of watching that belief play out at scale. Approximately seven of the schools I supervised were recognized as Washington State Award recipients for improving student achievement across English Language Learning, math, ELA, and innovation. While I was a principal in Illinois, my school was named a Spotlight School by the Illinois State Board of Education for the same kind of achievement gains.
But the accomplishment I am proudest of is not a test score. In Kent, I expanded the Parent Academy for Student Achievement (PASA); a program built to help parents who were new to the country, and new to the district, understand and navigate the American educational system. I built that program because I remembered what it looked like when parents were shut out of the process, and I was determined that it would not happen on my watch. I later had the honor of taking a Kent School District delegation, parents, principals, and community-based organizations together, to Harvard University for a Family and Community Engagement Institute, because I believe deeply that parents are a child's first teachers, and that families, schools, and communities do their best work when they treat a child's success as something they co-author together.
That belief followed me to Highline School District, where I served as Principal, and it is why I was so drawn to serve as Chief Academic Officer in Tukwila, a district deeply committed to race, equity, inclusion, and social-emotional learning. As the daughter of West African immigrants, that commitment is not abstract to me. I know, from my own family's experience, what it costs a community when it fails to make room for people who don't speak, look, or come from where the majority does. I also know what becomes possible when a school chooses, instead, to be a warm demander of equity for every child and every family who walks through its doors.
Why I Do This Work
I earned my Bachelor of Arts in Therapeutic Recreation from the University of Illinois at Urbana, a Master of Arts in Teaching, and my doctorate in Educational Leadership from National Louis University in Chicago. Along the way, my focus has always returned to the same questions: What does real leadership require, both theoretically and relationally? How does a single person, a teacher, a principal, a district leader, become an internal catalyst for the kind of change that actually reaches a child?
I became an educator because I watched two immigrant parents face a school building that was not built to hear them, and refuse to let that stop them from raising me well. I stayed in this work because I watched foster children lose their sense of home with every move, and I decided I could not accept that as inevitable. Everything I have done since, every school, every program, every leadership role, has been in service of one belief: that every student can learn, that every parent deserves a seat at the table, and that a school can be the place that restores hope rather than the place that takes it away.