Education A Heart and History of Service

By: Natalie Leggette

Dr. Tonia Howard Hall took her Oath of Office as a returning Board Member, at the Board of Education’s 2023 Oath of Office Ceremony on January 5th of this year. Dr. Howard-Hall was re-elected to represent the 8th District. She shared a touching memory of collecting the belongings of her deceased brother ten years ago. She was moved to find that her brother kept a letter that she had sent him while she was a student at Florida A&M University, postmarked October 13th , 1980. Her brother had kept this letter in his box of important papers. She had no idea that her brother saved her letter after all those years, and she had no idea how much that letter meant to him.

Accepting her position of service to the SCCPSS Board of Education, Dr. Tonia HowardHall sent another letter to her dear late brother Ronnie, from her heart to heaven. Her letter began by assuring her brother of her commitment to serve. She detailed her passions, “I am most passionate about early learning opportunities. I am passionate about student academic growth because, standardized tests have the proclivity to mask student growth and student progress. I have a passion for teacher recruitment and retention. And most important, I believe in policy, because policy is what drives an organization.” She told her brother that she is prepared, focused and qualified to serve and that the 36,000 students are the reason she will continue in service.

Dr. Tonia Howard-Hall is a proud product of the Savannah Chatham County Public School System and Tompkins High School Graduate. She shared with the audience and her late brother that she is a parent, a grandparent, a former teacher and a former administrator of Savannah Chatham County Public Schools. .

As she closed Dr. Howard-Hall asked her late brother to tell her grandmothers, ‘Thank You,’ Thanking her Great, Great, Great, Grandmother, who labored as a slave, on a plantation in Toombs County, Georgia. Thanking her Great, Great, Grandmother who never had the opportunity to get an education. She thanked her Great Grandmother, who never had the opportunity to vote, and she asked that he thank her Grandmother, who endured the hardship of the Great Depression accompanied with the Jim Crow Movement in the South.

She also shared in her letter to her beloved brother that she honors their mother, 86, who was forced to drop out of high school due to teenage pregnancy, yet she cared for and raised a family of eight in a one-bedroom apartment house.

Dr. Tonia Howard Hall declared that she stands on their shoulders. The blood, sweat, tears and sacrifices of the generations that have gone before her have enabled her to rise as an exemplary role model, not only for her own family, but also for the 36,000 children who attend the Savannah Chatham County Public School System.