State Superintendent of the Year Mentors Young Leaders

Dr. Barbara Jenkins, Superintendent of Orange County Public Schools, is well respected by her peers and in the Orlando community and beyond. In fact, she has the awards and accolades to back it up. In 2017 alone, she received a presidential appointment as a director of the National Board of Education Sciences, was named Florida Superintendent of the Year, Hispanic-Serving School District Superintendent of the Year, and the Florida Association for Career and Technical Education named her CTE Superintendent of the Year.

Having the Right Team

Like all great leaders, she says an integral part of her job is to put together a stellar team around her who share her vision and can get the job done. She takes it upon herself to engage in coaching and mentoring those with less experience to help them become great leaders, and potentially superintendents in their own right one day.

Student First Approach

When Barbara is faced with tough decisions on the direction of the district (the ninth largest in enrollment in the U.S.), she asks the same question every time: What is best for the children?

“Everybody from my operations folks to my facilities leaders to my finance to all of my instructional folks are focused on what is best for children,” she says in this interview. “What we try to drive home is that, somehow, every day in every classroom, every teacher has to be supported in order to make good things happen for all two hundred and eight thousand of our children.”

The children of Orange County, along with their parents and everyone else in the community are lucky to have a leader with that kind of focus on what is important.

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