Patrick Ervin
patrickervin@ddtonline.com
For any educator, perhaps the highlight of their career would be having the opportunity to sit with and have the ar the uppermost administrator in the nation. During Teacher Appreciation Week back in early May, Webb Kindergarten preparatory School lead teacher Tiffany Davis was one of only 15 educators in the country to participate in a round table discussion with US Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona. But, Davis put the context of the encounter of happenstance in perspective as a way to demonstrate how her access to Cardona and other officials could benefit the Greenville Public School District. “I’m a policy fellow with Teach Plus,” Davis explained. “I applied for the fellowship because I wanted to share my voice about issues such as equitable funding, how teachers should have input on the spending of ARPA funds and how to advise policy from a grassroots and classroom perspective- a bottom up approach for sound policy development.”
“The way I encountered the Secretary of Education was serendipitous,” Davis elaborated. “I was in the DC area at the first ever Thank A Black Teacher Event and Secretary Cardona had a meeting canceled which created an opening for the round table. Because of the traffic between Virginia and DC, I almost missed the meeting, but it was a great experience.”
Secretary Cardona broached topics mostly picking the educators’ brains about what types of programs they would like to see at the federal level. “I sat right down beside the man,” she said. “This was very significant for our school district because he got to hear from someone who was educated and worked in the same school district my entire career and whose children have been educated in this district.. I shared with him what the district looked like in its glory days and the frustration of not having anyone in the school district not fully buy in to the possibilities of supporting Teach Plus.”
Through Teach Plus, Davis has represented the state through the Mississippi office, served as a policy fellow and now as a senior policy fellow. The contacts she has made in these capacities have allowed this veteran educator of 26 years to “share the experiences and conditions on the ground about not only the most impoverished state but also the most impoverished area in the state. I liken our inability to take advantage of these relationships to a rainforest canopy where the sunlight never reaches the rainforest floor. We need to shed light on our local educational issues.”
Davis has a trip scheduled to reconvene with other policy fellows this summer and she has also been providing Mississippi’s Congressional Delegation (Republican Senators Cindy Hyde Smith and Roger Wicker and 2nd Congressional District Democrat Bennie G. Thompson0 with technical assistance relating to educational policy. Davis has also used her policy fellow position to craft an op-ed calling for a more supportive environment for teachers called “Pay Raise in Just a Start” which ran in the Greenwood Commonwealth. “Tiffany Davis is a leader who knows the way, goes the way and shows the way,” said Debra Reeves, principal of Lucy Webb. “She is one that not only teaches knowledge but stimulates others to gain it.”
