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her study on education and human resource study, with talent identification and development and acquisition. To diversify her background, she chose the higher ed route. When she returned to Louisiana, she became principal of the largest district and the youngest person to serve as the principal in the district at 28 years old, the second woman and the first African American in Louisiana. Her goal was to wrap up her dissertation by age 30. She turned 30 the same year that she completed her dissertation and graduated. She served as a principal for two years
before she had an epiphany.
Black faculty members. She went through a few accreditation cycles and in three years became the department head. By age 34, she was the first Black chair of an academic department. But there was a quiet burning desire that she had never shared with anyone. “My goal was always an unspoken one. One day to teach at an HBCU,” she said. Over time she had come to accept that Black faces were needed everywhere. Not just for students of color, but also it was important for all people to see African Americans and women of color in positions of authority. “It was great to see Black students who saw me at commencement when the Black grandmas are waving at me because they are happy to see someone that looks like me in that space,” she said. “But as important was the acknowledgment by my white students to say I never had a Black professor. The perspective I hope added to their experience. Particularly as future educators teaching all kinds of students.”
“In the spring semester I decided that I didn’t love the job in a way that I felt the school deserved. I had enjoyed everything I had done before this. It could have been a number of things – station in life, who knows, but I just didn’t have the passion for it."
Both of her mentors said separately – “You have to trust your gut.”
“That was my first exercise in grown- up faith where I told my district leader my plan to resign at the end of the academic year. The question was, ‘what are you going to do?’ and the answer was, ‘I don’t know yet.’” Her immediate supervisor told her that he would hold her resignation letter until she had a sense of what she was going to do. She started looking for positions in higher ed and ended up landing a job as an assistant professor of educational leadership at
Louisiana State University in Shreveport, Louisiana. It was a commuter population, maybe 10% Black students and six
She brought an online master’s degree program to the school. She was remarried, had a daughter and life was good.
She was thinking – what’s next?
There was an opportunity for an associate dean position, but she felt like she was already doing all the work for the position without the
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