Teacher of the Year Leon Smith says Pennsylvania schools need teachers of color

Leon Smith, Pennsylvania’s newly named Teacher of the Year, grew up knowing he wanted to be an educator. 

He had strong role models: Both of his parents were teachers, and his mother worked in the school district of Philadelphia for more than 50 years.

Smith says, however, that perhaps the main reason he entered teaching was to show children that people who looked like them could be teachers.

“When I went through my K to 12 education, I never had a teacher that looked like me, and that mattered because as I was considering working with young people, I was definitely looking for role models,” said Smith, who grew up in Montgomery County’s Upper Dublin Township. “I was definitely looking for others that I could ask questions and see how they do it, and that didn’t exist. 

“And so one of the things I said to myself is, I want to be a teacher so that there’s no one else that would go through that same type of experience,” Smith told the Pennsylvania Independent.

Smith did indeed go on to be an educator, and for the past 22 years he has taught in the Haverford Township School District in southeastern Pennsylvania. He currently teaches ninth grade honors and Advanced Placement Social Studies and 10th through 12th grade African American studies at Haverford High School in Havertown.

Those decades of work paved the way for interim acting Secretary of Education Angela Fitterer to announce on Dec. 9 that Smith is the 2025 Pennsylvania Teacher of the Year. 

“Each year, Pennsylvania’s Teacher of the Year celebrates the educator who is ‘head of the class’—a teacher with the values, experience, and dedication needed to support their learners and set them up for success,” Fitterer said in a press release. “Mr. Smith perfectly exemplifies what it means to be an excellent educator, and his commitment to his school is making a lasting impact on his students, their families, and the surrounding community.”

Smith was one of 12 finalists for the award. The Teacher of the Year program is co-sponsored by the Pennsylvania Department of Education and the Pennsylvania chapter of the National Network of State Teachers of the Year program. This year, 660 nominations were submitted for the Pennsylvania designation.

In 2025, Smith will travel throughout the state to meet and collaborate with fellow educators and will represent the commonwealth in the National Teacher of the Year program. 

As part of his new platform, Smith said, one of his goals is to encourage more people of color to become educators in Pennsylvania, a state where nearly half of the public schools have no teachers of color, according to a 2022 publication from Research for Action, a Philadelphia-based education nonprofit. More than one-third of the state’s school districts employ no teachers of color, according to the same report. 

During his acceptance speech at an annual professional development conference held by the state Department of Education, Smith noted that fewer than 7% of the state’s teachers are people of color, while 38% of the state’s students are people of color. A Department of Education spokesperson confirmed those numbers.

Bringing more people of color into teaching, and supporting them once they are in the profession, is critical, Smith said. He noted how important it was for him to interact with a Black male student teacher as a child.

“We only had him for a few months, but I do remember the way I felt when he walked into the classroom; I felt affirmed,” Smith told the Pennsylvania Independent. “I felt excited that, because I went to a predominantly white high school, the students there would see this distinguished man dressed in a shirt and tie. These were things I saw regularly at my church and in my family, but I knew that wasn’t the prevailing images that the media and movies and those types of things were showing.

“For me, I wanted that to be something that was more mainstream, the image of a Black male educator,” Smith continued. “I wanted that to be something that was more normalized.”

In order to increase the number of teachers of color, as well as better support them once they are teachers, Smith said, there needs to be a more comprehensive understanding of the history of racism in education. Smith noted that Black educators were at the forefront of pushing for school desegregation in the lead-up to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that established that racial segregation into “separate but equal” schools violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. However, following the 1954 ruling and the desegregation of schools, tens of thousands of Black educators lost their jobs, in large part because racist school district leaders both fired Black teachers and principals and refused to hire Black teachers to work at predominantly white schools.

That massive job loss, combined with the country’s racial wealth gap, continues to negatively affect the nation’s educational landscape today, leaving Black individuals with fewer resources to pursue degrees in education. Black educators who do enter the teaching profession can often face isolation in a country where just 6% of teachers are Black, according to a 2023 report from the National Center for Education Statistics.

Smith praised Gov. Josh Shapiro’s work to address the lack of opportunities for people of color in education by securing state funds for student teacher stipends and said other programs to drive down costs for students of education is crucial. Once Black educators are teaching in schools, Smith said, it’s critical that they connect with other educators of color and are supported by their school leaders.

“I think the administrators and leaders in the building should check on their educators of color,” Smith said. “We can’t just assume that their experiences are going to be the same as other educators, because it’s just not.”

Additionally, it’s important that educators of color are able to teach about the history of race and racism and other issues affecting communities of color, Smith said. In recent years, right-wing lawmakers and activists have worked to limit and eliminate such topics from public schools.

“We’re in a very difficult environment right now, and I think it’s important, for example, if you’re a Black educator, a Hispanic educator, a Native American educator, that you have the ability to talk about your history, you have the ability to teach in ways that may be connected to your community,” Smith said. “Because I think it’s difficult to go into an environment where you’re not allowed to share your lived experience.”