Tunette Powell
Powell is passionate.
Powell is a truth teller.
Tunette Powell is a warrior who has dedicated her life to disrupting the status quo while also honoring the freedom dreams of those who have come before us – our ancestors who believed that education could be and should be a passport.
Powell is an author, educator and the mother of three sons who all attend schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Known as an activist scholar, Powell has been on the frontlines, locally and nationally, fighting with her village to address a host of different issues, including the school-to-prison pipeline, implicit bias, parent and village engagement in schools, equity, and school-induced collective trauma.
Powell’s work in education spans more than a decade where she first started as a substitute teacher. Additionally, Powell has taught reading literacy, hip hop writing, life skills and teen parenting classes at alternative high schools and through nonprofit organizations. She has worked with school districts to provide teacher professional development throughout the country, including the Los Angeles Unified School District, Redondo Beach Unified School District, Dallas Independent School District and Omaha Public Schools.
Powell, who resides in South Central Los Angeles, is currently a doctoral candidate in the department of Education & Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Her dissertation, The Scars of School Suspension: Narratives as Testimonies of Collective Trauma, examines the wound dealt to Black parents of children who have been suspended in early childhood education. She is the program director of the UCLA Parent Project – a project focused on developing, nurturing and sustaining parent engagement and parent leadership in schools, especially at schools serving Black and Brown families.