Today, we are honored to profile the extraordinary Dr. Natalie Smith, Founder and CEO, Global Citizens Public Charter School in Washington, D.C.
On any given day at Global Citizens Public Charter School in Washington, D.C., a four-year-old might greet you in Mandarin, a kindergartner might switch effortlessly into Spanish, and a parent might text their school’s founder to share that their child was speaking Chinese to a dentist they met on vacation.
For Natalie Smith, Founder and CEO of Global Citizens, these are all relatively common occurrences and serve as evidence that a school built on language and identity can change the way children see themselves and the world.
“The joy that comes from seeing and hearing about these students expressing themselves in different languages is hard to describe,” Natalie said. “I’m getting chills now.”
That joy is the product of a school Natalie built from a blank page: Global Citizens, a language-immersion elementary school in Ward 7 that teaches predominantly Black and Brown students three of the world’s most spoken languages: Mandarin, Spanish, and English.
Finding the Right Fit
Natalie’s path to school leadership was never a straight line, but every turn pointed toward the same place.
The daughter of Chinese-Jamaican immigrants, she was born in Miami, raised in Brooklyn, and educated first in New York City public schools. After fifth grade, her mother — determined to give her daughter greater opportunities — enrolled Natalie in a private school in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where Natalie suddenly had access to a swimming pool, lacrosse, soccer, and track: opportunities she’d never had before.
But the access came with a cost.
“I kind of felt like I had to leave who I was at the door,” Natalie said.
It was during those years that Natalie first learned about Emmett Till and began to understand racism and prejudice. This real-world realization often ran alongside, and sometimes against, the education she was receiving in the classroom.
That tension between opportunity and belonging would come to define Natalie’s life’s work: building schools where children never have to choose between the two.
A first-generation college graduate, Natalie studied business at Georgetown University, where a tutoring program first pulled her into D.C. public schools and working with students in the predominantly Black Ward 8.
“I would go bring them books and games and activities during weekends,” she said. “I realized working with those students was where I really fit.”
From Classroom to Coaching
Natalie’s formal entry into education came through Prince George’s County’s teacher residency program in Maryland.
“It was one of the best decisions of my life,” she said. “I was dreaming about the lessons that I was planning. I really loved teaching.”
That love of teaching extended beyond students to helping other educators grow.
Natalie moved into instructional coaching, serving as Director of Academics and Staff Development at The Arts & Technology Academy Public Charter School, a 600-student charter school in D.C.’s Ward 7. She then transitioned to school leadership as Vice Principal at Cesar Chavez Public Charter School for Public Policy. In 2014, she took over as Head of School at Sela Public Charter School, then the district’s only Hebrew-immersion school, in just its second year.
With Sela, she inherited a school with a $200,000 line of credit, no assessment systems, and a leadership vacancy: the school’s principal had quit on the first day of the previous school year.
“I honestly did not know what I was getting myself into,” Natalie said.
What she found was a mission. Natalie spent the summer before her first school year talking to every Sela staff member, trying to learn everything she could about the school’s situation. After recruiting a new team and implementing new systems, Sela became a Tier 1 (high-performing) school, per DC Public Charter School Board’s performance rating system.
Bigger picture: Watching students in language immersion outpace their monolingual peers convinced Natalie of something she would carry into her own school one day: language cannot be a luxury.
“Our students who lived in Ward 8 had to travel over an hour to get to our school,” she said. “It was an equity and access issue for me, so I said to myself that their commute could never be that far if I ever had a chance to open my own school.”
Fostering Global Citizens
That conviction became Global Citizens Public Charter School, which Natalie opened in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic with 60 students in pre-K3 and pre-K4. The school has grown steadily every year since — to 110, then 161, then 198, then 228 — and is projected to reach roughly 260 students in the coming school year as it grows toward 5th grade in 2027.
Building a school from scratch, Natalie learned, proved to be an entirely different challenge.
“When you’re forming a school, you have to be intentional about every single thing, even the smallest design choices,” she said.
That intentionality extended well beyond color choices and curriculum. For Natalie, recruiting teachers from countries like Israel, China, Taiwan, and Colombia meant confronting assumptions those educators sometimes carried about the predominantly Black and Brown students they’d be serving.
“We had to do a lot of mindset work,” Natalie said. “We asked ourselves, ‘What has to be true in order for Global Citizens to exist?’”
The answer became the school’s four founding pillars, hammered out over chart paper at a Panera Bread with her founding principal.
“Social Justice” sits at the center of those pillars — flanked by “Whole Child Wellness,” “Academic Excellence,” and “Globally Competent Bilingualism” — and is reflected in an interview process that asks incoming educators, regardless of what language they teach in, to reckon honestly with their own biases and assumptions before they ever step in front of a class.
Facing the Realities of Charter Leadership
Like many charter founders, Natalie’s biggest and most persistent obstacle has been facilities. Even starting her search 18 months out, she came down to the wire finding a home for Global Citizens.
The school’s first facility came together through a partnership with Friendship Public Charter Schools’ Patricia Brantley, which allowed Global Citizens to co-locate on the school’s Friendship Collegiate Academy campus.
This year, facing the end of that original agreement, Natalie again found a path via relationships built throughout years in the sector, eventually landing a new facility at the former Capitol Riverfront campus of Eagle Academy, roughly 13 to 15 minutes from Ward 7.
“It can be a silo,” Natalie said of charter leadership. “Many times, we’re the ones who connect each other.” She points to an informal group text of fellow school leaders — one she asked to join after meeting them at a conference — as a lifeline for everything from vetting HR consultants to comparing policies.
Natalie was also recently named to the DC Charter School Alliance’s Executive Committee for the 2026-27 and 2027-28 school years.
Beyond facilities and funding, Natalie is candid about the sheer breadth of what charter leadership demands: academic outcomes, student and staff well-being, chronic absenteeism, compliance, shifting political dynamics, and crises no one can fully prepare for.
“Our job is to plan for and address any number of challenges, while making sure our students don’t feel any of that,” Natalie said.
A Lesson in Care
Natalie traces much of her leadership philosophy back to her own early years in the classroom, including watching and learning from school leaders.
She still remembers a principal at Robert R. Gray Elementary in Maryland who noticed a normally cheerful student crying uncontrollably one rainy day, discovered his shoes were soaked through, and simply bought him a new pair of sneakers.
“That was defining for me,” Natalie said. “How do we take care of our children? How do we nurture and love them so they can be their best selves?”
For Natalie, that means building something bigger than herself: a school where children are empowered to use their voices (in multiple languages) and where they never have to leave any part of who they are at the door.