The throughline, from tutoring to principal to founder.

I was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1979, and grew up in the city's Trinidad neighborhood — the second of five siblings. My father was a bass player, cousin to Kool Bayan of Kool & the Gang. When I was in third grade, he converted to Islam and gave me the name Ginna, meaning “paradise” in Arabic. I left Islam at 15. My mother, Carmencita Cedeno, is a Puerto Rican registered nurse who specialized in infant and maternal care.

I went to Buffalo Public School 54 and the Olmsted School for the Gifted and Talented, then Bennett High School's Law Magnet Program. I started college as a premed major. In 1999, while working as a reading tutor for AmeriReads, everything changed.

I taught a young girl — I'll call her S. Miller — to read. Around the same time, my grandmother, Ruth Johnson, told me on video that I would be her schoolteacher. She was right, and she co-signed the path before I fully understood it myself. I became obsessed with reading instruction — an autodidact, teaching myself everything I could about how children actually learn to read. I taught middle school science — earth, life, and physical — for seven years, then moved into school leadership: assistant principal roles in Anne Arundel County and Buffalo Public Schools, and from 2011 to 2016, Principal of Leckie Elementary in Washington, D.C., where our team closed the achievement gap in math and reading for Black male students for three consecutive years.

In 2016, I co-founded Equitable Ink, LLC. In 2017, Equity Now, Inc. In 2019, that work became Legends Public Charter School, where I serve today as Co-Founder and CEO, and as Chief Academic Officer, designing the curriculum myself. I'm currently ABD (all but dissertation) on my Ed.D. in Educational Leadership and Policy at SUNY Buffalo, following two earlier master's degrees and a bachelor's, all from SUNY Buffalo.

I'm also a mother of two. Raising my own children while working the front lines of public education taught me something I couldn't have learned any other way: I always fought for other people's children. I wanted someone fighting that hard for mine, too. That didn't always happen. That gap is part of why this work is personal, not just professional.

Foundation of learning — reading — matters to me in a specific way: as a descendant of enslaved Africans who died trying to survive and to learn to read, teaching a child to read is not a small thing to me. It's the thing.