Maya Pollard

I started working at the age of 14 to basically take care of myself. I didn't live with either of my parents, so I've been working - I started working 3 jobs at 14. I enrolled myself into night school at 16, and then I got accepted into 8 colleges while attending night school. At 18, I left Philadelphia to live in Virginia to attend Virginia State University, the HBCU. I was called to go to an HBCU because my father, who passed in 2020, was an HBCU graduate, and I wanted to follow in his footsteps. There, I became a woman of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Incorporated, also inspired by my father because he's also a part of a Greek letter organization. When my father passed in 2020, after I became a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Incorporated, I am the oldest of all of my father's children, so I left school, Virginia State University, and I came back home to basically take on some family roles, help with my siblings, help with my father's funeral, and things like that. I wound up transferring to his alma mater, which is Lincoln University, the first degree-granting HBCU in the nation. There, I became the president of the chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Incorporated on campus. In that role as president, I served on the national board, I served as a delegate for multiple conferences, and I brought in 31 members by myself for the organization in one year. That really primed me to be a leader and gave me a chance to show myself what I'm capable of. Through our CHIP program where we basically made chip bags, snack bags for low-income schools, I began building a lot of relationships with them. I got my start in education through a staffing agency - I became a long-term auxiliary teacher in Philadelphia through an agency, and then through that agency, I then became a staffing coordinator for the schools who needed other long-term subs. Through that, that kind of helped me pay for college. I became the full-time staffing coordinator, and then that led me to eventually become a teacher, because I wound up filling one of the positions myself that I was supposed to be filling through King's Staffing. I just felt really called to get into the classroom. My biggest accomplishment is just working myself up through that ladder. I'm currently enrolled as a law student at Texas A&M in their Education Law and Policy program, and I really hope to affect some public school policy here in Philadelphia. I truly feel like a lot of the students that I have right now that have been pushed out of the traditional school system did not deserve to be pushed out, and I want to affect that policy that led them there.