Ethan Ashley
Co-CEO & Co-Founder, School Board Partners
Overview:
School Board Partners (SBP) is a non-profit organization that connects emerging, inspired, and diverse elected community leaders serving on local school boards with the training, support and mentorship needed to successfully push for high quality anti-racist school systems. For the last three years, School Board Partners developed and ran programming focused on building the knowledge and capacity of elected school board members of color. And while that programming has been largely successful, we have identified a large-scale competency gap in policy-making amongst our school board members of color. We are now seeking to address this gap by creating a new one-year policy fellowship for 30 elected school board members of color, aimed at equipping these leaders with the ability to evaluate, craft, pass, and execute third-way policies that dismantle structural racism and center children and families, ensuring that they can thrive and self-actualize.
Bio:
Ethan Ashley is an attorney and the Co-CEO and Founder of School Board Partners- a non-profit organization that connects emerging, inspired elected community leaders serving on local school boards with the training, support and mentorship needed to successfully push for anti-racist high-quality school systems. Beyond his role at School Board Partners, Ethan proudly serves as the Board President and District 2 Representative on the Orleans Parish School Board.
As District 2 Representative, Ethan has worked with his colleagues to pass a historic racial equity audit resolution to create policies to close the achievement gaps. Ethan also led the charge to rename schools in New Orleans with racist ties, which concluded in July of 2021. Under his leadership as Board President in 2020, NOLA Public Schools (NOLA-PS) became the first school district in Louisiana to call for a state of emergency at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and invested $5,000,000 in PPE and technology for students. As a member of the Orleans Parish School Board Policy Committee, Ethan led efforts to ensure the training of charter board members, changed the bus pick up and ride times for families and put in place a half-mile “walking” preference, allowing children a better chance to attend schools close to home, and passed a historic budget that increased the wages for the lowest paid workers to $15, becoming the first governmental agency to do so in New Orleans. To continue improving his skills as the District 2 representative, Ethan attended Georgetown University’s School of Public Policy to receive a certificate in Education Finance.
Ethan has worked on policy and advocacy issues in many positions, including on the Hill, at the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, at the Urban League of Louisiana, at the ADL, and for the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs. In his advocacy roles, Ethan helped to organize and pass legislation to end juvenile life sentences for nonhomicide offenses in Louisiana. Ethan's passion to change the infamous school-to-prison pipeline is what motivated his career change into the field of education policy.
Raised in a single-parent home, Ethan’s grandparents played a huge role in his life, including his grandmother and mother’s years in public school education. Not only did Ethan beat the odds after being diagnosed with cancer as a child, but he also beat the odds by becoming one of the youngest black students to graduate from high school- graduating from Woodrow Wilson High School, a law magnet high school in Los Angeles, at the age of 16. Afterwards, he continued his education at Howard University in Washington, D.C., where he obtained a Bachelor of Science in Political Science and a Juris Doctor degree by the age of 22. Ethan is happily married to Arielle McConduit; and they are raising two amazing school aged children.