I Had Seen This Before
I began my career working in Connecticut corrections facilities. It was there that I learned just how easily a young Black male could get caught up in the judicial system—and how difficult it was to get his life back on track once he was there.
Part of my job was helping clients find employment and rebuild their lives after release. That sounded simple enough until I discovered that many of the men I worked with could not read and write well enough to complete a job application. I was trying to help them find jobs when many lacked the basic academic skills necessary to even apply for one.
A few years later, I changed careers and became a special education teacher working with students with behavioral and emotional disorders.
And once again, virtually every student in my class was a Black male.
They were just younger.
The longer I worked with my students and their families, the more I was reminded of my previous career. Like my previous male clients, nearly all of my students struggled to read and write, and they were all performing below grade level in every subject. Undiagnosed learning disabilities were all too common. School attendance was a problem, and classroom disruptions designed to disguise their learning difficulties made behavior a major concern. And many were being raised by mothers who loved them but were struggling to maintain their authority as their sons grew older.
I remember thinking, I’ve seen this before.
In corrections, I was meeting young Black men after things had already gone terribly wrong. In my classroom, I was meeting Black boys while their stories were still being written.
That realization changed me.
Because I could no longer look at the young men I had met in corrections without wondering about the boys they had once been.
Could they read when they were ten?
When did they first begin struggling in school?
When did being behind academically become embarrassing enough that disrupting the classroom felt safer than admitting they didn’t understand?
When did the adults around them begin focusing more on their behavior than on what might have been underneath it?
When did they stop listening to their mothers?
When did they begin making decisions that would eventually close doors they didn’t yet understand they would need?
And perhaps the hardest question of all:
Was there a point somewhere along the way when their trajectory could have been different?
Years later, raising two Black sons of my own made those questions deeply personal.
I learned that coming from a “good family” does not make a Black boy immune. Educated parents don’t make him immune. A middle-class neighborhood doesn’t make him immune. A good school doesn’t make him immune. And loving him with everything you have doesn’t mean he will automatically develop the judgment, character, self-control, resilience, and decision-making skills he will need when you aren’t there.
That was an assumption I had to confront in my own parenting.
I had spent years studying children. I understood education. I understood behavior. I understood special education. I knew how schools worked.
And I was still learning how much intentionality it takes to prepare a child for life.
Over the years, I have watched good parents lose their sons to the judicial system, drugs, and suicide. I’ve watched bright young Black boys with promising futures make decisions that cost them opportunities they may never get back. And I’ve tried to comfort devastated parents left asking the same painful question:
“What happened?”
Eventually, I began asking a different one.
What happens before “what happened?”
What happens in the years when their stories are still being written?
What are children learning about responsibility, relationships, consequences, self-control, problem-solving, perseverance, and decision-making?
What happens when a child cannot read and learns to hide it behind behavior?
What happens when behavior is punished but the problem underneath it is never addressed?
What happens when parents assume the school will teach what the school assumes will be taught at home?
What happens when we repeat parenting practices we inherited without ever asking where they came from or whether they are preparing our children for the world they are entering?
And what happens when everybody loves the child, everybody wants the child to succeed, and yet no one is intentionally connecting all of these pieces?
That is where BlackEduPreneur began.
Not with the belief that Black parents don’t care enough.
Not with the belief that Black children need to be fixed.
Not with the belief that every teacher or public school is failing our children.
But with the realization that we have been addressing pieces of the child while too often missing the whole picture.
The parent matters.
The home matters.
The child’s beliefs matter.
Behavior matters.
Learning matters.
Character matters.
Teachers matter.
Schools matter.
Community matters.
And none of these exists independently of the others.
After more than three decades working across these spaces—as an educator, special educator, parent, professor, childcare provider, curriculum developer, school founder, and mother—I stopped seeing them as separate problems.
I began seeing an ecosystem.
And once I saw the ecosystem, I could no longer believe that changing one piece would be enough.
That is why BlackEduPreneur does not begin and end with parenting advice.
It asks us to understand what shaped us so we can become more intentional about what we pass forward. It gives parents practical tools for developing their children. It helps children build the thinking, character, problem-solving, and decision-making skills they will need for life. It equips educators to better understand and teach the children in front of them. And when the existing educational environment is not enough, it helps families and communities understand how they can create something different.
Different needs.
Different points of intervention.
One child. One ecosystem. Multiple points of transformation.
Because after everything I have seen—in corrections, in classrooms, in schools, in families, and in my own home—I have come to believe something very simple:
We do not have to wait until something goes terribly wrong to ask what happened.
We can become intentional while their stories are still being written.
And when we change what happens while the story is being written, we have an opportunity to transform the trajectory.