Following a nearly year-long extensive search, Today’s Students Tomorrow’s Teachers (TSTT), one of the nation’s teacher diversity mentoring programs, announced that Dr. Meredith Beckford-Smart, a Brooklyn native now living in Irvington, New York, has been appointed by the Board of Directors as its first executive director.
With more than 20 years’ experience of guiding nonprofit organizations in the education sector, Beckford-Smart officially assumed her TSTT duties on
Sept. 9. Most recently, she served as executive director for GenSpace, the world’s first community laboratory and REACH (Raising Educational Achievement of Harlem) at Columbia University Teachers College.
As TSTT’s Executive Director, she will focus on the organization’s mission of closing the teacher diversity gap in the nation’s schools by recruiting culturally diverse and economically challenged high school students, mentoring and training them throughout college and helping to place them as effective teachers in schools in their communities.
That mission began nearly 30 years when Dr. Bettye Perkins founded TSTT for which she has served as president and CEO. Under Perkins’ leadership, TSTT developed a viable mentoring model that has created a pipeline comprising more than 800 qualified high school and college students of color and more than 300 alumni who are changing the lives of students in New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Virginia.
“In general, the pandemic led to a high turnover in superintendent positions, which to begin with have been underrepresented with educators of color, ”noted Perkins. “At a time when more than 50% of students in the classrooms reflect the ever-increasing diversity of the general public but only 18% of instructors are teachers of color, the need to increase the diversity ranks of top administrators who are tasked with fostering teacher diversity in their school districts is more urgent than ever more.”
Perkins and the Board of Directors lauded the hard work, diligence and commitment of the selection committee members who volunteered their time and expertise in finding Beckford-Smart following the review of several top-level candidates. She noted that Beckford-Smart’s background and expertise mirror TSTT’s mission. “She is a transformational leader, forward-thinking visionary and equity-centered strategist who has a highly commendable track record in leading the staffs and devising and executing highly effective programs within the community to improve education, personal development and support systems.”
Beckford-Smart holds a Ph.D. in science education from Columbia University; a master’s degree in teaching and learning of biology for 7 to 12 grades from New York University and a Bachelor of Science degree in biology from Long Island University.
TSTT is an innovative career development model that addresses teacher shortages by recruiting culturally diverse and economically challenged high school students, mentors and trains them throughout college and then helps place them as effective teachers in schools in their communities.
