Today, we are honored to profile Valissia Allen, the extraordinary founder and current Chief of Strategy & Innovation at Leadership Preparatory Charter School in Memphis, Tennessee
Valissia Allen is currently the Chief of Strategy & Innovation at Leadership Preparatory Charter School, the Memphis school she founded more than a decade ago.
Before that, Valissia spent several formative years working as a public defender in Charlotte, watching the same story repeat itself.
“It was just the cradle-to-prison pipeline up close and personal,” Valissia said.
She started noticing patterns in her clients: increasingly young men who couldn’t read well and carried the particular hopelessness that comes from a childhood without many real choices. The same clients kept coming back, and her work started to feel like she was running into the same wall.
“I was having a crisis of the soul,” Valissia said. “I remember asking myself, ‘What kind of work would I do for free?’”
Although she had previously worked as a teacher and was volunteering as a tutor for an afterschool program at the time, Valissia’s answer to her own question was much bigger and, frankly, less rational than simply getting back into education full-time.
She wanted to start a school.
“Are You Oprah?”
Valissia’s friends and family were not immediately supportive of her plan to open her own school.
“They asked me if I thought I was Oprah because they couldn’t believe I wanted to build a school from the ground up,” she said.
Valissia said most of the people in her life advised her to parlay her trial experience into a lucrative private practice and leave the altruism to someone else. One friend, however, connected Valissia with BES — then known as “Building Excellent Schools”— a nonprofit that trains leaders to build schools that sustain excellent results over time.
After applying for and earning entry into BES, Valissa envisioned opening a school in Charlotte (where she was currently living and working) or Detroit (where she was born and attended high school). Valissia ended up in Memphis because that’s where she and her school were needed at the time, according to BES.
Despite working as a public defender for six years, Valissia said that opening a school was the hardest thing she has ever done.
“If I had known how hard it was going to be, I might have stayed a lawyer,” she said.
Transformational Impact in Memphis
Instead, Valissa became the driving force behind Leadership Preparatory Charter School. The Memphis school opened in 2015, and Valissa served as its CEO until last year. The K-8 school is among Tennessee’s top-performing schools by virtually any measure.
Leadership Prep is one of just six schools in the state serving a majority economically disadvantaged student population to receive an “A” for achievement in 2024. Students at Leadership Prep scored in the top 9 percent of all Tennessee schools in ELA and the top 19 percent in math.
The school was also one of 12 in Memphis to implement Opportunity Culture models, as part of their efforts to improve student achievement by extending the reach and impact of excellent teachers. The model uses multi-classroom leaders who provide instructional guidance and on-the-job development while also continuing to teach at the school part of the time.
According to Valissia, the Leadership Prep’s mission is to support students and help them graduate so they can transform their circumstances, not escape them.
“We don’t ask kids what they want to be when they grow up,” Valissia said. “We ask kids what they want to change.”
Finding Her Way to Education
However, if Valissia’s parents had their way, she would probably still be practicing law.
Valissia was born in Detroit, raised in California’s San Fernando Valley from age 3 to 15, then transplanted back to Detroit in time for high school. According to Valissia, California gave her access to higher-performing schools in more affluent neighborhoods, even though her family didn’t have much money. Upon returning to Detroit, Valissia became an honors student at a lower-performing school than she was accustomed to in California.
“I graduated from a school in a struggling urban district where less than 60% of students graduate,” Valissia said.
She was accepted into the University of Michigan, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in English and Literature. Valissia was interested in pursuing a career in education, despite her family’s objections.
“My parents always told me that I was too smart to be a teacher, and so the expectation was that I would go to medical school, dental school, or law school,” she said. “Something with prestige and a clear income trajectory.”
Valissia made a deal with her family: she would take “a little time” to teach first, then figure out the rest. She was accepted to dental school and deferred in favor of going to work at a low-performing charter school in Detroit, where she taught middle school. Unfortunately, she had no training and no roadmap for her first teaching position.
“I actually want to apologize to those middle school students because I was really winging it,” she said. “I did the best I could.”
The teaching career may not have lasted — Valissia enrolled in law school soon after — but the experience sparked a desire to work with and serve children that remains to this day, even after stepping away from the top position at the school she founded.
Building Something That Outlasts You
After ten years as Leadership Prep’s executive director, Valissia stepped into a new role last year as Chief of Strategy and Innovation, handing the ED position to Tenisia Hicks, who has been part of the school since its second year.
The transition, according to Valissia, came at the perfect time.
“I’m proud that, if I decided not to support her tomorrow, the school might look different, but it would still exist and continue to thrive,” she said. That’s a particular kind of pride: the pride of having built something that doesn’t depend on you to survive.
Valissia is still close to the work, still learning from other charter schools, and still thinking about what it means to bring more innovation and student-centered exploration into a school that has already cracked some of the hardest problems in public education.
Her parents, she notes with some amusement, remain uncertain about her career choices.
“They are still pretty confused about it all,” she said.