This week, we are excited to profile Adonica Pelichet Duggan, CEO of the Baton Rouge Alliance for Students, an extraordinary leader who is shining a light on the right to a quality education for all children.
“I tripped and fell backwards into what is the family business,” said Adonica Pelichet Duggan, CEO of Baton Rouge Alliance for Students.
Despite coming from a family of educators, Adonica initially had no interest in working in the education field. However, her career in communications led her to join the leadership of the Zachary Community School District. In 2003, the Zachary Schools separated from East Baton Rouge Parish Public Schools, forming Louisiana’s first new school district in about 60 years. Adonica helped the new district get off the ground—calling the opportunity “very challenging and also rewarding.”
Advocacy for Students
Adonica dedicated herself to building a school district from the ground up, helping Zachary Schools become one of the highest-performing districts in the state, consistently ranking at the top for the past ten years.
Adonica returned to her roots by joining the leadership team at East Baton Rouge Parish schools, the district where she was raised. However, after noticing gaps in the educational services provided in her community, Adonica was inspired to create change and opportunities for local students. She joined New Schools for Baton Rouge, an organization founded in 2012 by community leaders to ensure that every child in Baton Rouge can access an excellent education. She also began incubating the Baton Rouge Alliance for Students, to elevate community voices in education discussions.
Creating an Alliance for Change
“We wanted to be the people who were showing up at every school board meeting and talking about how this was going to impact the kids on the ground, how every policy decision was going to impact the kids in Baton Rouge,” said Adonica, describing her mission in creating the Baton Rouge Alliance for Students.
The Baton Rouge Alliance for Students seeks to ensure that students are at the forefront of school improvement decisions in the city, engaging a coalition of local civic and business leaders into conversations and action.
“We think about empowering families to make sure that they are equipped to partner in their children’s education,” said Adonica. “We think about elevating communities and engaging with leaders.”
And exciting things are happening in Louisiana, which Jed wrote about last week. The state has seen several cycles in a row of improved NAEP scores, boosting Louisiana from the bottom to the middle of the pack. And charter schools in the state are experiencing robust growth, although public education enrollment in the state has experienced sharp declines.
Charter schools in Baton Rouge made significant gains in Louisiana’s 2024 School Performance Scores. Seven Baton Rouge charter schools increased their state performance score by at least one grade letter. (And none of them dropped a letter.) They also increased the number of students in “high-quality” seats by 19%—adding 2,476 seast last year.
The Advocate in All of Us
“Where you are on the power spectrum tells me a lot about how you experience advocacy and how necessary you feel it is, because you may walk to the conversation with a different set of power,” Adonica said.
When you call up a school leader and ask why their child’s teacher has been absent for three days of school, this is a form of advocacy, said Adonica. However, advocacy doesn’t always look the same way.
“I think that as we think about the families that have been most underserved historically, and making sure that somebody wakes up and thinks about every child in this community it is critical that you have a larger perspective.”
Any parent will tell you that you can never incentivize a parent against the interest of their own children. Still, Adonica argues that someone has to be thinking about advocating for the impact on every child. Adonica approaches her work by wanting every family to have every tool they need to advocate for their child.
“I think people underestimate how political everything is when they have power,” she said. “Everything is about your ability to advocate.”
Adonica’s recommendation to charter school leaders is to be proactive about recognizing that there is a political landscape to this work. She says that there is an advocacy muscle that has to be built and exercised to make sure that they can continue to have the conditions that allow them to educate kids successfully. Charter leaders can’t keep their heads down—or it will be too late.
“I don’t think that good things happen when people aren’t paying attention, and they just don’t. The world doesn’t move from chaos to order, it moves from order to chaos,” said Adonica. If we’re not paying attention, I think that we can miss what’s happening.”
Creating Advocates in the Community
While working for New Schools and in her time with East Baton Rouge schools, Adonica noticed that at cocktail parties and social events, even the city’s influential leaders were largely disconnected from what was happening in public education.
“We saw this as an opportunity to both help to elevate the issues, make sure that general public awareness of what they could be doing to better support outcomes for all of our city’s children looked like, and then, to hold people accountable,” said Adonica.
The Baton Rouge Alliance for Students created the CHANGEMAKERS cohort to educate community leaders on education issues. Baton Rouge has one of the highest private school utilization rates in the country and many leaders are unaware of the issues affecting public schools: “These were very engaged community leaders who I would see in a million nonprofit spaces. They just didn’t really have their finger on” education issues, Adonica said. “Like, ‘I don’t know what a charter school is.’” She saw opportunity here to develop advocates.
The CHANGEMAKERS program takes local leaders from the corporate, nonprofit and public sectors and spends 10 months conducting an in-depth exploration of the Baton Rouge education ecosystem with them. CHANGEMAKERS visit schools, meet with policymakers and hone their skills in education advocacy. Adonica’s goal is for program graduates to leave with “a comprehensive grasp of our complex public education system and geared with the tools to go into the community and be both truth-tellers and advocates.”
“How much better could we be as a community if every child had what they needed in order to be able to offer their gifts to the community?” asks Adonica.
Now in its eighth cycle, the CHANGEMAKERS program has graduated more than 150 leaders eager to advocate for education improvements in their community. The recent class received more than 100 applications for 25 spots. The demand is high and a testament to the desire for community members to grow their capacity to help students.
Participants come from diverse backgrounds—geographically, economically, and by industry background—encouraging interactions among individuals who wouldn’t typically collaborate.
“We are not going to elect a school board or hire a superintendent or hire a school principal who is going to put on a cape and miraculously make everything better for every child in this community,” said Adonica. “Every one of us has a role in how we support schools to be able to deliver the quality of education that we want, and part of our role as an organization is helping people to see the part that they play,” she added.
The CHANGEMAKERS program not only elevates educational issues but also enhances public awareness, encouraging participants to champion initiatives for local children. The connections formed within the cohort often lead to collaborative efforts, driven by a collective desire to improve outcomes—even without prior educational expertise.
An Education Tapestry
“We always describe it as a diverse tapestry of schools that serve the unique family values and needs of every family in our community,” said Adonica.
The mother of four children herself, Adonica thinks that there’s no one school or one circumstance that fits the needs of every family. In addition to the private and parochial options available, Adonica believes that charter schools play a vital role in the tapestry of high-quality school choices that can meet the needs of all children and families.
“Making sure that all of the things that a family could potentially want from schools are captured in all of the school offerings of our community is something that’s really important,” she said.
Adonica believes that the most significant challenge for both charter and traditional public schools is aligning resources to the things that have the highest impact on young people.
“Talent is one way it shows up, facilities, investment, student-based budgeting…are we aligning resources to what we can know kids need to be successful, and then, if not, why aren’t we right?” said Adonica.
Education for All
“I believe in the greatness of every child,” said Adonica, thinking about their untapped potential, which drives her work.
“The idea of young people who are in schools that aren’t nurturing their inner genius and providing them what they need to be able to say, I’m going to show up and offer this back to a community that I love and care about,” she added.
On a wall in the Baton Rouge Alliance for Students office, it says, “Excellent education is every child’s birthright.”
“I believe that if we are going to make communities better, every kid needs to have what he or she needs to be able to meet their full potential,” said Adonica. “We are robbing our communities of what young people have to offer the communities by not supporting their lives in the ways that they that could be allowing them to share their unique gifts with us as a community.”