Current Role
Kevin Jennings serves as Assistant Deputy Secretary of Education, heading the department’s Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools (OSDFS). In this role, Mr. Jennings leads federal efforts to promote the safety, health and well being of America’s students through programs aimed at drug abuse and violence prevention, improving physical and mental health, effective emergency preparation for and response to disasters, and promoting civic education. OSDFS disburses $400 million annually, making over 1100 grants through 15 competitive grant programs.
Upon his appointment in 2009, Mr. Jennings was charged with the redesign of the programming of the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools to bring about a more data-driven, focused approach that would yield measurable gains in student health, safety, well-being, and academic achievement. The result is a new grant program entitled “Safe and Supportive Schools” (http://www2.ed.gov/programs/safesupportiveschools/applicant.html) that awards grants to support statewide measurement of, and targeted programmatic interventions to improve, conditions for learning in schools. This is intended a prototype for a wholesale restructuring of the office’s programming as explained in the department’s Blueprint for Reform of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, entitled “Successful, Safe and Healthy Students” (http://www2.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/blueprint/index.html).
In his role, Mr. Jennings also serves as the Department’s point person for work with federal, state, local, and nonprofit partners seeking to address issues of safety, violence and substance abuse. He represents the Secretary on the Congressional Coordinating Council on Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, co-chairing Education and Youth at Risk Task Force. He played a key role representing the Department on interdepartmental commissions that developed new National Drug Control Strategy (http://www.whitehousedrugpolicy.gov/strategy/) and the nation’s first comprehensive strategy to prevent and end homelessness. (http://www.ich.gov/). Mr. Jennings serves on the Department of Education’s senior management team and its Policy and Strategy Committees. He is a leader of the Department’s Indian Education Initiative (http://www2.ed.gov/about/inits/ed/indianed/about.html), which is charged with developing a strategy for serving Native American and Alaska native students.
Education
Mr. Jennings grew up in difficult circumstances. His father was a fundamentalist evangelist who died when he was eight; his mother, who had grown up in Appalachia during the Depression and had only a grade school education, then supported the family. The family’s economic challenges meant frequent moves: Mr. Jennings attended nine different schools in four different states, primarily in the rural south, before graduating from Radford High School in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1981. Despite these challenges, Mr. Jennings’ mother, Alice, never gave up her dream that her son would some day attend college, and with her constant encouragement and support, Kevin became the first member of his family to graduate from college when he received his B.A. magna cum laude in history from Harvard University, where he delivered the Harvard Oration at the 1985 commencement. In 1993 he was named a Joseph Klingenstein Fellow at Columbia University’s Teachers College, from which he received his master’s degree in interdisciplinary studies in education in 1994. In 1999 he received his M.B.A from New York University’s Stern School of Business.
Prior Professional Experience
After graduating from Harvard in 1985, Mr. Jennings became a high school history teacher and coach, first at Moses Brown School in Providence, R.I., from 1985 to 1987, and then at Concord Academy in Concord, Mass., from 1987 to 1995. At Concord, he chaired the History Department and became the faculty advisor to the nation’s first Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA).
In 1990, Jennings founded the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), a local volunteer group in the Boston area bringing together lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) and straight teachers, parents, students, and community members who wanted to end anti-LGBT bias in the state’s K-12 schools. In 1992, he was appointed by Massachusetts’ Republican Governor William Weld to co-chair the Education Committee of the Governor’s Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth. He was the principal author of its report, Making Schools Safer for Gay and Lesbian Youth: Breaking the Silence in Schools and in Families, whose recommendations were adopted as policy by the Massachusetts State Board of Education.
Interest from other states led Jennings to leave teaching in 1995 to build the all-volunteer GLSEN organization into a national force, serving as its founding Executive Director until 2008. Under his leadership, GLSEN’s programs became commonplace in America’s schools as GLSEN supported the development of Gay-Straight Alliance student clubs in over 4,300 middle and high schools; staged Day of Silence with events on over 7,700 junior high/high school campuses involving over 700,000 students; and created No Name-Calling Week, an anti-bullying program for K-8 grades (today the second most-used anti-bullying program in U.S.). GLSEN’s advocacy was key in passing comprehensive safe schools laws in eleven states, increasing the number of students protected from less than 900,00 in 1993 (less than 2% of the national student body) to 14.3 million by 2008 (nearly 30%). During his tenure, Jennings grew GLSEN’s budget from $100,000 in 1995 to over $7 million in 2008 with diversified revenue streams from major donors, grants, events, direct marketing, and program fees and developed over 40 corporate partnerships with entities such as Cisco, IBM, and MTV.
Honors And Awards
Mr. Jennings was named in 1997 to Newsweek magazine’s Century Club as one of “100 people to watch in the new century.” He has received the Human and Civil Rights Award of the National Education Association, the Distinguished Service Award of the National Association of Secondary School Principals, and the Diversity Leadership Award of the National Association of Independent Schools.
Civic Leadership
Jennings is a Board Member of the Harvard Alumni Association, where he co-chairs the Undergraduate Relations Committee. He has been a guest lecturer for the Harvard Business School Social Enterprise Program. He co-chaired the endowment campaign for the University’s Mathiessen Professorship, creating the nation’s first endowed, named chair in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender studies (http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/fo-matthiessen/?scp=1&sq=F.O.%20Matthiessen&st=cse). Mr. Jennings and his partner also funded the creation of the University’s Eugene Cummings Prize (http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k65741&pageid=icb.page301813#a_icb_pagecontent594961_E) in memory of Eugene Cummings, a son of an Irish immigrant schoolteacher from Fall River, Massachusetts, who ended his life on June 11, 1920, just days short of receiving his degree, after being interrogated and informed that he would be expelled by the “Secret Court” that purged gay men from Harvard in 1920. For his service to the nation and to Harvard, Mr. Jennings was elected by his classmates as the Chief Marshal of the 2010 Commencement (https://hr1985.com/chief-marshal-election), an award voted by the 25th reunion class to the member of the class who has had the greatest positive impact on the world since graduation.
Mr. Jennings also serves on the Board of Union Theological Seminary (http://www.utsnyc.edu/). He is an active member of its Strategic Planning and Development Committees, having led the search for the Seminary’s new Vice President for Institutional Advancement in 2009. He is Board Chair for the Tectonic Theater Project (http://tectonictheaterproject.org/Tectonic.html), which created The Laramie Project and the recent Tony-nominated 33 Variations, starring Jane Fonda in her first Broadway performance in over 45 years. From 2004-2009 he served as the National Fundraising Chair for the Appalachian Community Fund (http://www.appalachiancommunityfund.org/), where he established the Alice Jennings Fund to help low-income and battered women have the opportunities his own mother was denied as a girl and woman from Appalachia.
Mr. Jennings also serves on the Leadership Council for Cambodian Living Arts (http://cambodianlivingarts.org/), which supports both the revival of Cambodian traditional art forms and contemporary artistic expression so that Khmer arts will have become a wellspring of Cambodian strength and resiliency and a vital source of healing and reconciliation. Mr. Jennings’ longstanding interest in Cambodia stems back to the early days of his teaching career, when he taught Cambodian refugee children who had escaped form the horrors of the Khmer Rouge genocide.
Publications
Mr. Jennings has authored six books, with his latest, Mama’s Boy, Preacher’s Son: A Memoir, being named a Book of Honor by the American Library Association in 2006. He also helped write and produce the documentary Out of the Past, which won the 1998 Sundance Film Festival Audience Award for Best Documentary.
Personal
Mr. Jennings and his partner, Jeff Davis, a senior executive at Barclay’s, are celebrating their 16th year together in 2010. They are the proud “parents” of a golden retriever, Amber, and a Bernese mountain dog, Ben, and also have a “granddog” in Ben’s son, Jackson, born in March 2009. He is a founding member of the New York City Gay Hockey Association (www.nycgayhockey.org) and plays left wing.