Why did you choose to be an educator?

I started going to school thinking primarily that I wanted to go into social work. I work for the Department of Child Protection and Permanency, which was DFYS at the time, for a couple years and I also was a foster parent. I got the idea relatively quickly that there was more we could be doing to prevent children from going into services like that. I definitely thought that education was a part of that so that’s what drove me to be a teacher. Then as a teacher, I worked at Long Branch High School under some really great principals who pushed me to go back to graduate school and to get into leadership. From there I went to Columbia University.