It’s been a difficult year for parents navigating their children’s education. From changing COVID-19 protocols to contentious school board meetings, an education funding overhaul and censorship efforts, many difficult conversations are happening — some that may distract attention from student learning.
Elizabeth “Bibi” Hines and the other leaders of Nashville’s Parent Advisory Council are working to keep parents informed, facilitating conversations between parents and the school district.
“If you take the district-wide [Parent Advisory Council] meeting or school board meeting — it’s just so big,” Hines tells the Scene. “The topics are kind of over your head, it may not help you prepare to meet the needs for your child.” Hines says the council combats that by operating in clusters so parents can support and advise each other about nearby schools.
Hines has served as the chair of the Parent Advisory Council since last March. When she first learned about the group, it wasn’t fully functioning — it only had two active clusters. After the pandemic-necessitated virtual school year, parents wanted to get the council fully up and running. Hines initially wanted to run for the District 7 school board seat vacated by Will Pinkston, but she hadn’t lived in Nashville long enough. And so she ran for the Parent Advisory Council chair and won.
Though Hines didn’t grow up in the Metro Nashville Public Schools system, she comes from a family of educators. She had family members who taught in Nigeria, where Hines was born, and her mother has also worked at several universities here in the U.S., and is currently at Meharry Medical College.
Hines obtained a civil engineering degree from the University of Virginia. After she graduated, she says, “The intent had been to go back to Nigeria and complete this dam in the city I grew up in. But as probably most immigrants find out, once you get your degree in the States and you start working — unless you work for maybe U.S. aid or an international company — the chances of going back [are] slim to none, because you have a life here now, and this is the only life you’ve known.”
When Hines became pregnant with twins, “It was clear that I wasn’t going to go back to that engineering life as I’d known it.”
She moved to Nashville in 2017, and her twin boys were ready for school. Hines had worked as a substitute teacher and tutor, and she “knew about PTAs from movies” — and that she wanted to be part of one. “I came in hot [to] the first PTA meeting, because I had been hearing all of these things about no funding … and teachers are leaving and school board members are upset. And I came into the PTA meeting, and we were talking about … selling cookies or T-shirts or something. … I thought we were coming to a meeting to solve world problems. And we were here to fundraise. So I was in the wrong room.”
Eventually, she found the Parent Advisory Council.
In her time as chair, she has facilitated town halls before board meetings that have covered topics like student dashboards and academics, provided parents with information about district operations, led a panel discussion about COVID-19 and hosted viewings of the Nashville Public Education Foundation’s By Design: The Shaping of Nashville’s Public Schools documentary.
Leading the council is a volunteer position. Hines also works for the nonprofit Braver Angels, a group that defines itself as a “citizens’ movement to bring liberals, conservatives and others together at the grassroots level.” She says her job has helped her as the chair of the Parent Advisory Council. “You have all these individuals who are very passionate about all their ideas. … And [I ask], ‘How can we get all these different people to agree to something to come to a compromise?’ ”
Hines notes that she wants to follow the lead of Nashville’s student board members: “Angelie [Quimbo] and Abenezer [Haile] are setting an example of students. I don’t think it will be beneficial for students coming to the school board meeting and screaming at the board for what they want. So Abenezer and Angelie are going in and approaching it with what I would consider dignity and integrity, and it’s admirable. So that’s the same thing I want for our group.”
Moving forward, Hines wants to be a teacher and interact with the district from the inside. In the fall, she’ll start working toward a master’s degree in education at Vanderbilt. She received a scholarship, which is geared toward training more science, technology, engineering and math professionals to become educators. Her long-term goal is to become a principal at Croft middle school — when current principal Dr. Jeremy Lewis is ready to pass the baton, of course.
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