For Leon Smith ’01, 2025 Pennsylvania Teacher of the Year, the path to education began long before he ever set foot in a classroom as a teacher. The son of two educators, he grew up watching his parents dedicate themselves to their students year-round. At church, he listened to his pastor deliver sermons that felt more like lesson plans. They were engaging stories with takeaways that lingered long after Sunday service. But the moment that shaped him most came in high school, when, for the first time, he encountered a Black student teacher.
“When he walked into the classroom in a sharp shirt and tie, I felt a sense of pride,” Smith remembered. “I thought to myself, this is a problem that there are very few Black teachers in the school. If I become a teacher, I want to be the example I never had.”
That realization planted the seed for his career and his ongoing mission to ensure students of color see themselves represented at the front of the classroom.
Smith spent the summer of his eighth and ninth grade year as a camp counselor. The older counselors often praised his ability to connect with campers. “They would say, ‘You do such a great job, the kids listen to you,’” Smith recalled. “I enjoyed interacting with them. It made me feel good about myself, and working with young people felt like something I could do.”
Later, in high school, he watched Theo Huxtable on “The Cosby Show,” working in a community center with Black students who looked up to him. It was an easy choice, during his senior year, to shadow his fourth grade teacher as part of his high school internship.
At the University of Maryland, Smith entered the teacher preparation program in 1997 with plans to teach science, but quickly discovered that his true passion was in social studies. He gained strong teacher training in the classroom and during his student teaching experiences at Buck Lodge Middle School and Northwestern High School.
He once again noticed the lack of Black men in education and Black peers pursuing a degree in education. “I looked around my methods class and thought, man, I stuck out like a sore thumb,” he said, realizing he was the only Black male in the classroom.
Smith was just 21 years old when he began working as a history teacher at Haverford High School in 2001. A Black assistant principal at the school became a mentor, guiding him through the challenges of being a young Black male educator in a predominantly white community.
“She affirmed me when I needed it most,” he said. For more than two decades, Smith has stayed at Haverford, teaching multiple generations of students, including the children of students from his earliest classes. His classroom is filled with images of Jackie Robinson, Nelson Mandela and other icons of resilience and change, creating a space where students see that history and representation matter.
In 2018, Smith attended a racial literacy workshop at the University of Pennsylvania, where he met other Black educators seeking strategies to better navigate race-related situations at work. So many of them had articulated the very challenges Smith had been facing alone, following the retirement of his assistant principal.
“After that summer things really changed for me because I began to realize that I had a story,” he recounted. “I began to realize that there were other people that were going through what I went through and that I need to speak up because I could help someone early in their career who may be considering leaving the field.”
That turning point led him to join an affinity group for Black male educators and to become involved in Teach Plus (pictured), a national teacher-leadership organization that trains experienced educators to influence policy. As a policy fellow, Smith helped push for changes that would directly impact future teachers, including a new law providing stipends for Pennsylvania student teachers.
In December 2024, Smith was named the 2025 Pennsylvania Teacher of the Year, becoming the first Black educator to receive the award.
“It means more and more each day,” he reflected. “I want to make sure that in this moment, and with this platform, that I elevate the voices of Black educators that have been doing this work way before me, and will do it way after me. I’m even more motivated to advocate for all students to be successful, to make sure that we have more educators of color, more diversity, more students that are seeing themselves in the curriculum.”
In May 2025, the “Today” show’s Craig Melvin and Savannah Guthrie interviewed Smith about his mission to inspire others to enter the field of education. His wife Vivian, son Gabriel (10) and daughter Mikaela (13) accompanied him.
“I have a great sense of purpose and I understand the impact that an educator can have. It is one of the most vital professions in our country,” he said. “I tell students who may not see themselves represented at the front of the classroom, ‘Be the teacher you wish you had. Be that person for the next generation.’”
