PAA established our first Board of Directors in July 2012.

Natalie Beyer has three children in the public schools in Durham NC, where she was recently elected to the school board. She earned a bachelor’s degree in English and Behavioral Science from Rice University and a Master’s of Healthcare Administration from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has served as PTA President at two DPS schools and is the ministry leader for Youth and Family at her church. She is also one of the founders of Durham Allies for Responsive Education (DARE), an organization dedicated to building support for and enhancing the quality of education in the Durham public schools. Email Natalie

Karran Harper Royal works as an Education Advocate in New Orleans. She is the Assistant Director of  Pyramid Community Parent Resource Center and the former Training Coordinator for the New Orleans Parent Organizing Network.  Her work at Pyramid involves providing one to one support to parents of children with disabilities and conducting workshops to help parents understand their rights under federal special education law.   In addition to working with Pyramid and New Orleans Parent Organizing Network, Mrs. Harper Royal is a contributor to Research on Reforms and provides a parent voice to the work at Southern Poverty Law Center. She is married with two sons, one of whom is a public school student in New Orleans   She blogs at Education Talk New Orleans.  Email Karran

Pamela Grundy lives in Charlotte, North Carolina and is the mother of a fourth grader at Shamrock Gardens Elementary, where in 2009-10 the student body was 89 percent poor and 94 percent nonwhite. She holds a BA in history from Yale University and a PhD in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her graduate and postgraduate work has been supported by fellowships from the Spencer Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and her writings on history, education and society have received national awards from the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, the History of Education Society and the Oral History Association. She is a founding member of Mecklenburg Area Coming Together for Schools (Mecklenburg Acts), a four-year-old grassroots coalition of parents, citizens and organizations working to build community commitment to equity and excellence in all of Mecklenburg County’s public schools. She also blogs at seenfromtherock.blogspot.com. Email Pamela

 

Karen Miller is a long time PTA volunteer, and the former legislative chair of the Austin (Texas) Council of PTAs.  In that position, she worked to retain class size caps, preK and full day K funding, first established by Texas’ landmark school reform bill in 1984.  She is still actively advocating to preserve these programs currently.  For many years, she was the Regional PTA chair in Gulf Coast area, Houston League of Women Voters Education Chair, Texas League of Women Voters School Finance Chair and Texas PTA legislative chair for four years.  She serves on a legislative advisory committee in her school district, Cypress Fairbanks, the third largest in the state.  She has also done  research for the anti-voucher group Texas Coalition for Public Schools and the Texas Freedom Network, an organization fighting for religious freedom, civil liberties and stronger public schools.

Dora Taylor is a parent of a high school student at a public school in Seattle, Washington, and is an architect and teacher.  In response to school closures in the Seattle Public School system, Dora and her co-editor, Sue Peters, started the blog Seattle Education 2010 to report on and analyze education issues, and to protect the Seattle public school system from the corporate model and privatization efforts of the Gates Foundation, headquartered in Seattle.  More recently, she has blogged for Huffington Post to highlight effective education reforms, and formed Parents Across America, Seattle with Sue Peters. Email Dora

 

 

Julie Woestehoff has been with the Chicago non-profit organization Parents United for Responsible Education (PURE) for 20 years, and has been its executive director since 1995. She is the parent of two Chicago Public School graduates, a veteran elected local school council member, and writer of the blog, PURE Thoughts, which covers key education issues. Julie is a frequent speaker on topics of parent involvement, site-based management, and student testing, is regularly interviewed on national and local news, and was named one of the 100 Most Powerful Women in Chicago by the Chicago Sun-Times in 2004.  In 2003 along with the rest of the PURE staff, she won the Ford Foundation’s Leadership for a Changing World Award, recognizing powerful grass-roots leadership.  She also has a regular column in the blog Chicago Examiner and the Huffington Post. Email Julie