SJ Smith

Sarah Jean Smith has worked in education for 22 years, serving students on four continents in many different capacities. She grew up in Miami, Atlanta, Japan and New Zealand. She realized she wanted to be a life-long educator when she had the privilege of teaching health classes throughout Northern Peru. She became fluent in Spanish as she taught environmental education in Ecuador, sex-ed in brothels in Peru, and fought for indigenous rights in Argentina.

After years of service in South America, she moved to New Orleans after Katrina, where she worked in public schools. While working as a school leader there, she got the chance to work with TFA (Teach for America) and TNTP (The New Teacher Project), and did a two-year leadership training with Leading Educators. She was a part of the charter-school revolution that transformed New Orleans’ schools after the storm.

In 2012, she moved to Asheville, where she worked as an elementary, high school and middle school Spanish teacher. She helped open the Franklin School of Innovation (FSI), and eventually became that public charter school’s high school principal. She was called to school leadership while teaching high school in Asheville, seeing a need for change in the area’s school. She spent her first year of school leadership as the Academic Director of a therapeutic boarding school for adolescents battling addiction, and later went on to lead FSI, an EL Education school. 

After five years as a site leader, she left the principal’s office to work with The New Teacher Center, a national nonprofit that focuses on equity issues in education. She worked with school districts throughout the Western Hemisphere, creating and facilitating professional learning experiences for school leaders, teachers, and district leaders. As an educational consultant in this space, she had many opportunities to engage in iterative, organic processes that highlight district-based solutions to racial equity issues in thousands of classrooms.

She has extensive firsthand knowledge of experiential learning, project-based learning practices, second-language acquisition, capacity building for school leaders, mentoring and coaching best practices for teachers and principals, adult learning theory, and successfully addressing racial equity gaps in education.