Dean Futrell speaks in a strong voice and articulates her ideas with great clarity and assurance, according to Mr. Goldberg. But she well understands that listening carefully and working with people are two other characteristics of leadership. MARY HATWOOD Futrell, former three-term president of the National Education Association and today the dean of the Graduate School of Education and Human Development at George Washington University, was not placed in the academic track in her segregated school in Lynchburg, Virginia, more than 40 years ago. The counselors and teachers at Dunbar High School liked Mary, understood that she was bright, and her work hard, but they concluded that her family was far too poor to maintain her in college. When Futrell was a small child, her father was quite ill. He died when she was 4 years old. By age 10, Mary and her older sister were occasionally helping their mother clean homes and restaurants. Young Mary was always under pressure from her mother to achieve at a level in As her mother told her many years later, knew you had potential, and I felt it was my responsibility to make sure you developed that potential. I was willing to work as much as I had to to give you the support to go to school. Josephine Hatwood did considerably more than that, although she herself had only a sixth-grade education. My mother always read to me and my sister, had spelling contests with us, checked our report cards, and came to school any time it was necessary - even though it might mean changing buses two or three times. Mrs. Hatwood didn't understand the implications of tracking well enough to press for Mary to be in the college-bound program and trusted the counselors to make the right decision. However, by Futrell's junior year in school she was fifth in her class of 89 students and getting such grades that she was finally moved into the academic track - too late to take a foreign language or advanced math, but not too late to be on the path to college. At Futrell's school graduation ceremony, she received an unusual and utterly unexpected scholarship from the teachers who had actually taught her. came up on the stage and handed me these envelopes with $1,500 for college. They had gone to the local businesses, churches, and sororities and collected this money for Mary Hatwood. These were the teachers who had entered her essay in a state contest in which she became a finalist, who had told her to believe in herself and to respect herself, and who had convinced her that nobody could ever take my education away from me. The South was still segregated when Mary Hatwood began her undergraduate work in 1958 at the all-black Virginia State College in Petersburg. Mary studied both education and business to increase her chances of getting a job on graduation. She did well in college, where had teachers who pushed me and demanded things of me. The demands made by her mother and her teachers in school and college became part of Mary Futrell's being and outlook. If you are around Futrell for any length of time, you hear the phrases hard work, determination, and high standards over and over. In 1963 Futrell went to work in the Alexandria, Virginia, school system as a junior and senior school business education teacher. It didn't take her long to become involved in the local teachers' association. got involved because I didn't like what they were doing. I thought the association should get more actively involved in issues that supported what teachers wanted to do in the classroom. These were also the difficult years during which the schools in Virginia were being desegregated, and minority teachers were frequently treated disdainfully, sometimes even being demoted to nonteaching positions. Futrell bridled against this treatment of some of her colleagues. In 1976, after more than 12 years of classroom experience and considerable activity in her local and state associations, Futrell sought the presidency of the Virginia Education Association (VEA), although she was strongly discouraged from running, and obstacles were placed in her way. …