Eldrin is the 2016 winner of the Scott Morgan Award. Read the announcement.
Eldrin Deas, the grandson of a sharecropper, has always felt a personal connection to the effects of educational inequity. He has spent his entire career devoted to education.
He began as a math teacher in Georgia, and then became a math test developer in Washington, DC. He later served as an assistant director of the Centennial Scholars Program in North Carolina and as an analyst for the Connecticut State Department of Education. He has since become an education consultant and researcher, as well as a member of the education committee for My Brother’s Keeper Durham, where he is responsible for developing strategies to ensure boys and young men of color graduate high school.
Currently a researcher for the Education Policy Initiative at Carolina, Eldrin is investigating the implementation and impact of a new turnaround plan—the North Carolina Transformation program—for low-performing schools across the state.
To date, through his multiple positions in education, Eldrin has:
-
Sourced data from community voices, open access records, and policy documents to inform and drive policy to ensure more boys and young men of color graduate high school.
-
Helped craft an action plan for the city of Durham—delivered to and adopted by Mayor Bill Bell and Durham County Manager Wendell Davis—to help improve education outcomes for more than 28,000 typically underserved students of color.
-
Increased kindergarten registration efficiency in Delaware so that the more than 9,000 kindergarten students who begin school each year—including local students, transient populations, and English Language Learners—have adequate access to transportation and school resources, and so that school districts in the state are able to better plan for student placement and talent acquisition.
-
Disrupted the cycle of recidivism for 18,717 young adults between the ages of 18 and 25 who are incarcerated in California through the design of a new academy where students serving multi-year sentences can earn a high school diploma or GED.
-
Led the development and analysis of programs and turnaround initiatives in three Connecticut school districts, assisting in the management and disbursement of $1.5 million in special funds.
-
Established programs and services to promote the success of 242 minority male students—including 38 first-generation college students—at North Carolina Central University.
-
Advised staff attorneys at the UNC Center for Civil Rights, supporting the Center’s grassroots organizing, community outreach, research, data and policy analysis work on school desegregation cases in North Carolina.