Places & Faces W
hen Katrise Lee-Perera graduated from Sulphur High School in 1986, she didn’t initially plan on becoming an educator. Sure, she’d thought about it—she had educators in the family and nurtured a budding interest in teaching—but she’d also been raised as “a girl with limited resources who didn’t want to become an adult with limited resources.” Instead, Perera earned a degree in merchandising and marketing from the University of Louisiana, Monroe. After marrying her college sweetheart, Rajiv Perera, in 1991, they relocated to Charlottesville, Virginia, where she worked in advertising for JCPenney for a few years, but not before she fell into substitute teaching. Immediately, she knew that’s where her life was headed. And what a journey. In the two decades since Perera entered education, she has earned a master of arts in teaching from Mary Baldwin College, post-masters in administration and supervision from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, and a doctorate in education leadership and policy study from Virginia Tech. She started as a teacher in the hallways of Walker Upper Elementary School, then at Byrd Middle School in Virginia before moving into the assistant principal’s office at Short Pump Middle School, where she supervised more than 1,600 students. From 2004-2010, she served as principal of John Rolfe and Elko middle schools, where she championed innovative efforts to retain 98 percent of faculty and decreased disciplinary referrals by more than 20 percent. From there, she moved to the Houston Independent School District as Area Superintendent. She oversaw a cluster of the 297 schools and more than 43,000 of the 215,000 students in a district where more than 80 percent of the students were considered economically disadvantaged. Dr. Perera remained in Houston until 2011, when she was named superintendent of Isle of Wight County Schools in
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Katrise Lee-Perera, Ed.D by Erin Kelly
Thrive Magazine for Better Living
November 2015