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Kevin Jennings
Assistant Deputy Secretary for Safe and Drug-Free Schools
 Kevin Jennings was appointed by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in July 2009 as assistant deputy secretary to head the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools. Jennings brings to this role over two decades of experience as a writer, a teacher, and a leader in the fields of K-12 education and civil rights.
A native of Winston-Salem, N.C., he became the first member of his family to graduate from college when he received his bachelor's degree magna cum laude in history from Harvard University, where he delivered the Harvard Oration at the 1985 commencement. He was a high school history teacher, first at Moses Brown School in Providence, R.I., from 1985 to 1987, and then at Concord Academy in Concord, Mass., from 1987 to 1995. It was at Concord Academy in 1988 that he became the faculty advisor to the nation's first Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA), launching his life's dedication to seeking to ensure that schools are safe places where every young person can focus on learning.
In 1990, Jennings founded the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), a local volunteer group in the Boston area bringing together lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual (LGBT) and straight teachers, parents, students, and community members who wanted to end anti-LGBT bias in the state's K-12 schools. In 1992, he was appointed by Gov. William Weld (Mass.) to co-chair the Education Committee of the Governor's Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth. He was the principal author of its report, Making Schools Safer for Gay and Lesbian Youth: Breaking the Silence in Schools and in Families, whose recommendations were adopted as policy by the Massachusetts State Board of Education. The commission led the fight that made Massachusetts the first state in the nation to outlaw discrimination against public school students on the basis of sexual orientation and to establish, in 1993, a statewide program to ensure educational equity on issues of sexual orientation.
In 1993, Jennings was named a Joseph Klingenstein Fellow at Columbia University's Teachers College, from which he received his master's degree in interdisciplinary studies in education in 1994. He subsequently left teaching to set about building the all-volunteer GLSEN organization into a national force. Under his leadership, GLSEN made safe schools into a national issue, increased by over 600 percent the number of students protected from harassment and discrimination based on sexual orientation and/or gender identity, and grew the number of GSAs from under 50 in 1995 to over 4,300 when he stepped down in 2008. Under Jennings' leadership, GLSEN programs like GSAs, No Name-Calling Week, and Day of Silence became commonplace in America's schools.
Jennings was named in 1997 to Newsweek magazine's Century Club as one of "100 people to watch in the new century" and also received the Human and Civil Rights Award of the National Education Association, the Distinguished Service Award of the National Association of Secondary School Principals, and the Diversity Leadership Award of the National Association of Independent Schools.
Jennings earned an M.B.A. from New York University's Stern School of Business in 1999. He has authored six books, of which Telling Tales Out of School: Gays, Lesbians, and Bisexuals Revisit Their School Days won a Lambda Literary Award, and his latest, Mama's Boy, Preacher's Son, was named a Book of Honor by the American Library Association in 2006. He also helped write and produce the documentary Out of the Past, which won the 1998 Sundance Film Festival Audience Award for Best Documentary.
Jennings serves on the boards of the Harvard Alumni Association and Union Theological Seminary. He is also president of the board for the Tectonic Theater Project, which created such shows as The Laramie Project and the recent Broadway show 33 Variations. He is the national fundraising chair for the Appalachian Community Fund, where he established the Alice Jennings Fund to help low-income and battered women have the opportunities his own mother was denied as a girl and woman from Appalachia. He and his partner, Jeff, are the proud "parents" of a golden retriever, Amber, and a Bernese mountain dog, Ben, and also have a "granddog" in Ben's son, Jackson, born in March 2009.
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