THE EMPATHETIC EDUCATOR

Debra Sullivan

Member, West Virginia Board of Education and Advocate for Education, The Greater Kanawha Valley Foundation Board of Trustees

SUPERPOWERS: Persistence and dedication

From inner city students in Rochester, New York, to those who have taken the country roads of West Virginia to class each day, Debra Sullivan has taught them all. And in a way, being an educator is what she always knew she would do with her life.

“I think part of that came from being in a family with a number of children,” she says. “I babysat probably starting at age 8, just in the neighborhood. I would run little summer camps for the neighborhood kids. I enjoyed the energy of children, just looking at them, seeing the possibilities for them.”

In 2015, Sullivan retired as the principal of Charleston Catholic High School after a 28-year tenure—but her work didn’t end there. Now a member of the West Virginia Board of Education and an advocate for education on the Greater Kanawha Valley Foundation Board of Trustees, she continues to work in the interest of everyone in the state’s schools. She’s found fulfillment in both the hands-on nature of working directly with children and in the work that happens on a policy level, and she shows no signs of slowing down. She says her diverse resume and the many students who have been part of her journey have given her a perspective she’s grateful for. The many possibilities for children that she saw when she was a young person are something she never loses sight of.

“Children are children, no matter where they are or where they come from,” she says. “It’s about providing all of them with exceptional opportunities.” Seeing children as real people and envisioning the adults they will become, she says, are key to providing them with an education that respects them as individuals but doesn’t box them in. “We have to deal with whoever it is that comes in our doors and then take them to the next level,” she continues. “And understand their differences—but not allow those differences to abbreviate our expectations for them.”

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