Fellowship class sessions are full of opportunities to collaborate. Photo courtesy of Jalene Tamerat

School & district leadership

Better Training for Boston’s Next School Leaders

In its second year, the Carol Johnson District Leadership Fellowship is bringing more transparency and training to Boston’s school leadership pipeline

Decisions made at the school district level—good and bad—affect every student, family, and school. Few know this better than Anne Hernández, who has worked in Boston Public Schools (BPS) since 2007, most recently mentoring and coaching 17 social workers across 13 schools. During the 2024–2025 school year, Hernández was part of the inaugural Dr. Carol Johnson District Leadership Fellowship cohort, which she says she joined to learn how to influence a system to “become less limiting and more liberating.”

“My personal goal was to learn, to be surrounded by other fellows, their experiences, and perspectives, and to be challenged to grow professionally and personally into a district leader who is well-rounded, knowledgeable, and efficient,” she says.

The fellowship, named for the transformative superintendent of BPS from 2007 to 2013, is a 30-credit initiative to identify and train individuals who aspire to be senior leaders in the district or who seek to grow their current leadership capacity. The initial cohort, which ended in June 2025, comprised 15 fellows; seven of them hold leadership positions in schools and eight are staff and leaders in BPS’ central office. One of the goals of the fellowship is to ensure that district leadership reflects the rich racial and ethnic diversity of the student population, which is upwards of 80 percent students of color.

“A lot of the fellows in this program are Boston natives,” says Jalene Tamerat (’18), director of the fellowship and a senior lecturer at BU Wheelock. “Some of them are people who are either BPS alumni or have children in BPS. So they’re community members, a lot of them with very long-standing history in the city and in the district.”

BPS approached BU Wheelock’s Mary Churchill, associate dean of strategic initiatives and community engagement, with a proposal: collaboratively design a fellowship program that trains leaders before they take on more significant roles across the district, and at the same time create a more transparent process for how senior leaders are selected for promotion. The curriculum is laser focused on the district-level leadership, with current and former school district senior leaders, including from BPS, teaching alongside BU Wheelock faculty. Irene Dennison, associate director of BU/BPS academic partnerships, says she isn’t aware of another research university partnering with a public school system in quite the same way.

“I actually think we have a real opportunity to show and create the model for what a partnership between an institute of higher education and a large, complicated urban district can look like,” she says.

Hernández says the fellowship exceeded all of her expectations and pushed her and other fellows outside their comfort zones.

“I couldn’t have imagined the depth of learning and personal growth I would experience,” she says. “Every class had me on the verge of tears because being in the presence of my fellows is truly humbling.”