LifeChanger of the Year Nominee Profile

"One morning, I pulled up to the International School to drop my five-year-old off for kindergarten. And I saw Sarah DeWitt outside his school welcoming children. It was barely seven in the morning. I literally rolled down my window and said, 'Oh my God, Mrs. DeWitt, you look like you’re at Paris Fashion Week.' And I meant it. She knew I did because she knew I had been traveling to Paris, Milan, and New York Fashion Weeks for the last two years. She beamed in a Chanel-style collared maxi, perfectly paired with patent slingbacks, her hair and makeup immaculate, radiating pure joy at the sight of every child coming toward her," said Green.

On Ms. Green's way home, she tried to explain to her fiancé why seeing Mrs. Dewitt there had affected her so deeply, but she started sobbing. Her oldest son, Stelian, is a senior. Her youngest, Ezra, is in kindergarten. And somewhere between those two realities are thirteen years that nearly broke her. Stelian is autistic. Over the course of his education, he has attended at least nine different schools and programs. For years, seeing a school's number appear on her phone caused an immediate physical reaction. Her heart would start racing, and her body would go straight into a fight-or-flight response before she even answered. Sometimes they called more than once a day. Something bad had happened. Stelian had had a meltdown. He was dysregulated. He couldn't transition. Something had happened with another student. He needed her to talk him through what was happening. He needed to go home.

Ms. Green was always on crisis-management duty. Whatever she was doing stopped. It was a never-ending shift. She became his advocate, translator, crisis manager, source of calm, and the person who had to figure out what happened and what came next. When he was in fifth grade, things became so difficult that she was asked to attend school with him for months. She was a single working mom with no child support or backup. There was no way she could maintain a traditional job where someone expected her to clock in every morning and stay until five. No one gives a manual for navigating life with an autistic child.

Weekly, and sometimes daily, Ms. Green would need to leave everything and get her child. So she built her career around his needs, and her need for flexibility during the week. She ran a photography business, and working for herself let her be available when Stelian needed her. She can still picture herself sitting inside his Montessori classroom with her laptop open, editing photographs while trying to help Stelian make it through the school day. Ms. Green was trying to build a business. She was trying to pay bills. She was trying to raise her son. She was trying to keep him in school. And she was doing it without family nearby.

Ms. Green moved four hours away from home so Stelian could access some of the best schools in the state, while still close enough to get to her family when she needed them. If she had to fly somewhere for work on a weekend, she could meet her mom halfway, or they could figure out whatever arrangement would allow her to keep working and still be there for her son. Mostly, Ms. Green was trying to keep them all afloat.

"We had three different types of therapists involved at the same time. Additionally, there were evaluations, doctors, psychiatry appointments, medication changes and side effects, and terrifying medical challenges…I still had to make the next appointment, research the medications, coordinate the therapists, answer the school, pick him up, put the pieces back together, sleep if I could, and get up the next morning and do it again," said Green. "People who have not lived this have no idea what a battle it can be to parent an autistic child with complex needs. I say that with enormous love for her son. He is funny, intelligent, creative, and deeply sensitive. He has also needed more from me than I knew a human being could give another person. But it was brutal. And my experiences with schools were, at times, deeply painful."

By the time Stelian was in 10th grade at Bentonville West, Ms. Green had been bracing herself for years. That's where she met Mrs. Dewitt. She was Stelian's new assistant principal. The thing Ms. Green remembers most is her smile and her warmth.

"I know that sounds almost ridiculous after everything she had just described. A smile. But if you have spent years seeing a school number appear on your phone and feeling your heart race, you understand why walking into a school and having an administrator look genuinely happy to see you does not feel small. It felt enormous," said Green.

Ms. Green and Stelian were in an intervention meeting because Stelian had become so overwhelmed in class that he kept slipping out of the room and wandering the halls. Ms. Green had already been dealing with the school before this meeting. Stelian was being bullied, and another student had broken his phone at school. Mrs. Dewitt greeted her at the door of that meeting, and she smiled. Not a tight, professional smile. Not the kind people use when they are trying to get through an uncomfortable conversation. She smiled like she was genuinely glad Ms. Green was there. It stopped her for a second. She had come into that room prepared to defend her son. She had come prepared to explain, apologize, absorb criticism, and prove she wasn't ignoring the problem, but Mrs. Dewitt didn't make her do any of that. She listened to her. She let her finish. She looked at Ms. Green like she was a mother trying desperately to help her child, not an inconvenience attached to a difficult student. She treated her with dignity. With warmth. That may sound small, but at that point in her life, it was not small at all.

Mrs. Dewitt never made her feel embarrassed by her son. She never made her feel ashamed that things were difficult. She never made her prove that she was a good mother before she was willing to help her child. And she never looked at Stelian as if his hardest moments were the whole story of who he was. She saw him as a child who was overwhelmed and needed support. And somehow, in that room, she made Ms. Green feel like she was not alone in figuring out how to give it to him.

Even when a situation was stressful, Mrs. Dewitt had this almost uncanny ability to lower the temperature of the room. She was warm, bright, and funny, but also incredibly capable. Nothing about her kindness felt performative or soft in the sense of being ineffective. For the first time in years, Ms. Green felt like someone at school cared. She fought like hell for her son. His therapists fought for him. His doctors helped him. People who loved him helped carry him. And Stelian himself has fought unbelievably hard to be where he is today.

Mrs. Dewitt did something different: she made one part of those battles gentler. She did not make Ms. Green fight her, too. Ms. Green does not think Mrs. Dewitt had any idea how much that mattered.

One day, Stelian became sick at school and was throwing up. Ms. Green had to pick up his younger brother, Ezra, and try to get to a doctor's appointment. Bentonville traffic was awful, and she realized she wouldn't make it through Ezra's school pickup line and still get to the doctor's appointment. So she parked and ran through the heat and traffic until she found Mrs. Dewitt near dismissal. Ms. Green was frantic. She told her what was happening. Her older son was sick in the car. They needed to get to the doctor. She desperately needed to get her younger son, Ezra, without going through the entire pickup line. Ms. Dewitt looked at her and said, "No problem. Go to the office." That was it. She went. Out of nowhere, Ezra hugged her. When she looked up, Mrs. Dewitt was standing there, beaming that same unforgettable smile at her. Somehow, in the middle of dismissing an entire elementary school, she had left wherever she was stationed, gone to find her son herself, and brought him to her. She settled everything down. That same huge smile. Years later. Different school. Different child. Same Mrs. Dewitt.

A different morning, there Mrs. Dewitt was at dawn—radiant, joyful, looking like she had stepped off a runway, pouring pure light into every child walking through those doors. Something broke open in Ms. Green, and she sobbed the whole way home. For the first time, she could see the whole picture at once. Nine schools. Thirteen years. The phone calls. The therapists. The IEP meetings. The advocates sitting beside her because she could no longer face some of those rooms alone. The bullying. The medical issues. The little Montessori classroom, her laptop open, as she tried to earn a living while helping her child survive school. Stelian screaming underneath a table.

All those years when Ms. Green felt like she had to walk into a school prepared to protect her child from being misunderstood. After thirteen years, Ms. Green gets to begin again. And Mrs. Dewitt is standing at the beginning of it.

That is the kind of impact educators can have without ever knowing they had it. A smile is not small when someone's heart races every time the school calls. Kindness is not small when a mother has spent years entering rooms prepared to defend her child. Being treated with dignity is not small when you feel disparaged. Mrs. Dewitt gave Ms. Green those things during one of the hardest chapters of her life, and now she watches her five-year-old walk toward her every morning.

“For thirteen years, so much of school felt like a fight. Now I get to look at the beginning of another child’s education and feel something else. Hope. And when I think about why I feel it, I see Sarah DeWitt’s smile. That is why I am nominating her,” said Green.