Longtime educator and Jefferson County School Board Chairwoman Diane Porter resigns

Diane Porter, who served the children of Jefferson County for nearly 40 years as a teacher, counselor and school administrator, and then another 13 years on the Jefferson County Board of Education, has resigned to deal with what she is calling a “chronic illness.”

In a two-page resignation letter to her fellow school board members dated Tuesday, the longtime chairwoman expressed confidence in the remaining board members. “I have every belief that Jefferson County will continue to thrive under the leadership and collective efforts of the board members.”

Board member Corrie Shull said he planned to read the letter at the school board’s Tuesday meeting. He said Porter would not be there because she is in the hospital.

In more than 50 years with the school system, Porter was a fierce advocate for children of color and other students who would be marginalized because of their race, ethnicity and gender.

“I will not ever support discrimination,” Porter said in 2015 when she backed a plan that protected students and school employees based on their gender orientation.

On the school board, she became the first African American chairman of a district that is 40% Black and she helped pave the way for other minority members.

When she was first appointed to the board in 2010, she was the only Black member; JCPS now has two other African American board members.

Porter was, as one reporter who covered her said, the matriarch of public schools in Louisville.

She sought money and resources for West End schools as Superintendent Marty Pollio tried to dismantle the system of busing that required children be shipped out of the western parts of the city in an effort to integrate schools in the eastern and whiter parts of Louisville.

She fought for racial equity in the schools and pushed for the creation of the W.E.B. DuBois Academy, an all-boys school designed with an Afrocentric focus. Years later, she pushed for the Grace M. James Academy of Excellence, an all-girls school.

“The girls deserve the same intense focus that we are giving at the DuBois academy," she said. "There’s no reason to exclude them from the process.”

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Porter called on the district to hire more Black employees to make sure the teachers looked like the children they taught.

Joyce Drane, who spent years working for Porter as a secretary in different roles throughout the district, said Porter always encouraged her to do more than she thought she could.

“She was like a mentor,” Drane said. “Even though she was my supervisor, she was my friend. She took care to encourage me that I could do something bigger.”

But her supporters said the main thing she has done was keep a focus on education and making sure kids were prepared to learn and then had opportunities after they graduated.

“She has been an advocate for pre-K, diversifying upper administration and an advocate of shrinking the opportunity gap between the haves and have nots,” Shull said.

In her 39-year career in Jefferson County schools, Porter rose from a teacher, to guidance counselor, to an assistant principal, before she was made principal of Mill Creek Vocational School in 1987 and was tapped to head Westport Vocational School the following year.

In 1991, she was named head of Pleasure Ridge Park High School’s Technical program – at that point, she had worked 14 of the district’s schools. During her last decade as a school system employee, she headed up the district’s magnet and advanced programs where she tried to increase offerings for students at schools throughout the district and led a program that aimed to make sure kids were either college-ready or career-ready when they graduated.

She retired in 2009 but that retirement was short-lived.

Raymond Burse, the chairman of the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights and former president of Kentucky State University, said he urged Porter to come out of retirement to serve on the school board when Ann Elmore resigned.

Burse said he wanted Porter to run because she had attended Louisville public schools, had been a parent of a JCPS student and held such a wide range of jobs in the school system.

“All the jobs you would want a board member to have had, she has had,” Burse said. “She knows what buttons to push, whose buttons to push and how to get things done.”

In June 2010, state school Commissioner Terry Holliday appointed Porter to serve out Elmore's term.

That November, she ran for and won a full term on the board, campaigning on a platform of raising student achievement, increasing the quality of instruction and maintaining diversity in the district.

“It is important that we work on individual student academic needs and provide strong instructional support to eliminate our low performing schools,” she said at the time.

Within a month after her election, Porter voted to oust Superintendent Sheldon Berman over concerns that he hadn’t acted quickly enough to close the learning gap between Black and white students.

“Although we are showing some areas of improvement, we still have a lot of work to do,” she said then. “My decision was based on that, but also based on conversations I had with district staff and members of my community.”

In 2012, she was elected as chairwoman of the school board.

In that role, Porter pushed back against those who wanted to undo the advancements made in diversity in the district by reverting to a system of neighborhood schools that she felt would doom Black students to inferior education.

Resegregation, she said, was “not an option for our district.”

When a member of the legislature called for neighborhood schools again in 2017, she rejected the idea again. “Going back will not get us where we need to be,” she said.

She became board chair again in 2018 when Chris Brady stepped down from that role, and led the district through negotiations with the state, which was threatening to take over the district because of low performing schools.

When the district developed its new student assignment plan, which for the first time in nearly five decades allowed all students in the West End to remain at their home schools rather than being bused, Porter made sure money and resources were flowing to that part of town.

Burse said she also pushed to make sure the school district was giving real-time assessments on the learning gap between Black and white students so that the school district could constantly reassess and alter its approach to making sure students of color were learning at the same rate as white kids.

Burse also said she prided herself on being prepared for meetings, knowing the issues and also knowing where her constituents stood.

But Porter didn’t always vote the way they would have wanted her, he said.

When she voted in 2019 to put more police in schools – when many of her constituents opposed such a move because of past incidents involving police and young Black men – Burse said she struggled with the decision.

“She did what she always did,” he said. “She did what was best for students. … Students needed to be safe in order to learn.”

Porter was given the city’s Martin Luther King Jr. Freedom Award in 2019.

“She gives people hope, is what I think. Especially people in the community who are vulnerable,” said Bruce Williams, the pastor of Bates Memorial Baptist Church. “They know even if they don’t have a voice anywhere else, they have a voice through her.“

Porter is always impeccably attired. Vanessa McPhail, director of the district’s diversity, equity and poverty program, said that once when her daughter saw Porter, she looked at her and said, “Mommy, she looks like a queen.”

And McPhail said that “Ms. Porter,” as she always calls her, carried herself like a queen.

“I would never dream of calling her ‘Diane,’” she said. “If I heard someone refer to her as Diane, I would look at them like, ‘That’s disrespectful.’ We put Ms. Porter on a pedestal.”

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The Rev. David Snardon, pastor of the Joshua Tabernacle Missionary Baptist Church, said on the board, Porter acted in such a way that you couldn’t help but respect her.

“There was a dignity in the way she carried herself,” Snardon said. “Her style was not the type that she would attack you, but she would quietly hold you accountable.”

Burse said that served her well as she tried to keep public disagreements of board members at a minimum and to bring her maverick board members into line.

“She had experience in all of those area and that knowledge came to bear,” he said.

“She was a steady and guiding influence to the JCPS, she brought a calming influence to that because she could speak from experience,” Burse said.

And when board members had “wild ideas,” Burse said she was able to “bring them into the fold as to what was reasonable and what was possible.”

Shull said Porter will forever be remembered for what she did for Jefferson County Schools.

“She is in my mind the foremost advocate of an excellent, equitable, education for all children who reside in Jefferson County. There is no one who comes even close to her years of service and she is without peer when it comes to what she has done.”

Joseph Gerth can be reached at 502-582-4702 or by email at jgerth@courierjournal.com.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Jefferson County School Board chair Diane Porter resigns