LifeChanger of the Year Nominee Profile

Ponchitta Redrick was nominated by a friend, Dawn Hills. 

Ms. Redrick has spent more than twenty years doing the work that rarely makes headlines and always changes lives: sitting with a student on the hardest day of their week and helping them understand why they reacted the way they did, then giving them the tools to do it differently next time.

As the MTSS Disproportionality Specialist at McNair Middle School in Fulton County Schools, she serves students across all grade levels, identifying the root causes behind behavioral challenges and building interventions that address the cause rather than punishing the symptom.

Her path into education began in childhood, playing school with her dolls and stuffed animals long before she knew it would become a career. The turning point was her fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Little, who had a gift for making every student feel special and capable. Ms. Redrick has spent her professional life passing that gift forward.

Ms. Redrick's central contribution is the creation of safe space. Students who are dysregulated, frustrated, or shutting down come to her and find an adult who will listen before correcting. That safety is what makes the intervention work: once a student can name what is happening, they can begin to change it. She extends the same approach to classrooms, coaching teachers on how to build environments where students with and without disabilities can learn together successfully.

Ms. Redrick leads by strengthening the adults around her. She works directly with teachers on the most challenging cases, translating behavior data into practical classroom strategy. She is particularly attentive to paraprofessionals and classroom assistants — she insists they be treated as skilled educators rather than as extra hands, and she has been vocal about how much a well-supported assistant changes outcomes in a large classroom with limited resources.

Across two decades and multiple schools, including Roswell High School and now McNair Middle School, Ms. Redrick has specialized in the students other systems find hardest to serve. She supports students with IEPs and general education students alike, recognizing early when a student needs additional support, initiating the process, and partnering with families to implement strategies that hold up at school and at home.

Ms. Redrick's commitment is personal. She is the mother of a child with an IEP, and she has lived the experience of advocating for a child inside a system that does not always move quickly. Watching her own child persevere and succeed is what sustains her. It also gives her a rare credibility with parents: when she sits across from a family, she is not only the specialist, she is someone who has been on their side of the table.

Ms. Redrick's role — disproportionality specialist — exists because outcomes in schools are not always distributed fairly. She took on the work of examining who is being disciplined, who is being referred, and why, and then changing it. She treats every student as capable, protects their dignity in moments when they have the least control, and holds the same high expectations for the adults in the building that she holds for herself.

Ms. Redrick is what Mrs. Little was to her: the adult who makes a child feel capable, safe and seen. She has been doing this for twenty plus years, for the students who need it most, and she is a deserving nominee for LifeChanger of the Year.