The truth came out on the front page of the Capital Gazette last week. They identified Romey Pittman - the driving force behind the application of New Village Academy to open as a “High School Done Differently” in 2024 in the vacant Lord and Taylor site at Annapolis Mall - as my sister.
It’s true. I have a sister who spent the last quarter century teaching and creating schools, figuring out what works to engage kids in learning all across the country and as far away as India. I think she’s brilliant, and I’m thrilled that her organization’s application to the Board of Education to create a public charter school to address the opportunity gap in Annapolis was described by staff as the best they’ve seen, and was unanimously approved.
I’ve had zero influence on my sister’s thinking about education, but her work has influenced me. Now that you know about that one sister, I might as well come clean. There are others. They’ve all influenced me. You see, I was born into a public policy think tank.
My sister Polly directs the Institute for Health Workforce Equity at George Washington University’s School of Public Health. Her husband Tom Croghan researched health policy at Rand Corporation and Mathematica before fully devoting himself to restorative agriculture and viticulture. Her daughter Laura Gutierrez was Manager of the Annapolis Office of Community Services and started this week with Comptroller Brooke Lierman as Director of Small Business, Policy, and Community Development. Her other two daughters are doing equally impactful work in New York and Argentina.
My daughter Jesse is the Chief Development Officer at the Downtown Women’s Center, an organization dedicated to “ending women's homelessness in greater Los Angeles through housing, wellness, employment, and advocacy.” Her mother Karen, who I was married to for twenty years, does research on federal nutrition assistance programs at Mathematica.
My wife Erin taught equine studies at the University of Maryland’s Institute of Applied Agriculture and is now working toward certification in genealogy. My sister Tammy was a nurse practitioner who worked on health policy for the Mayor of New York, and her husband Benjamin Warnke founded and runs Alembic Community Development in New York and New Orleans. Their daughter Eve just graduated from nursing school at Johns Hopkins.
I could go on and on because I have six siblings and 12 nieces, and most are working in nonprofits or government, and all of them influence my thinking on public policy.
I’ve pondered the question of why so many in my family are working in the public arena to improve the quality of people’s lives. My best answer is that we grew up with a sense of history.
My father was a Marine in World War II - what he called a “war against intolerance” - who then worked on the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe and as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Civil Defense during the Cold War. He instilled in us a sense that victory in war must not be hollow, that we have a responsibility to create something worthy of the sacrifice, starting with peace.
My mother did her part in that effort. She got a Masters Degree in Child Psychology and assessed kids with learning disabilities at the Kingsbury Center in Washington, D.C. And she kept us all humble, including my Dad.
We grew up on land that my great-grandmother bought from the Catholic Church. She bought it because she’d grown up there as a child before her two aunts donated it in exchange for weekly prayers for their souls.
I don’t know what those aunts said or were told when they visited the Vatican and agreed to the transaction, but the timing was twenty-five years after emancipation and their family had enriched itself on the backs of enslaved Africans and African-Americans. I, my siblings, and our children grew up very aware of the history on that land, and the trauma inflicted there by our forefathers.
I don’t believe that my generation or my parents’ has it all figured out. We’re neither responsible for nor absolved of the sins or the successes of the past. But we’re aware of them. That awareness is my best explanation for why so many in the family that I’m part of are working for a better future.
Every one of us has roots in the past, whether we know the stories or not. There are those that bring us pride and those that bring us shame. My optimism about the future is based on the fact that human beings have the capacity to learn from our stories and create better ones. That’s what they’ll do at New Village Academy, at GW’s School of Public Health, at Downtown Women’s Center, and that’s what we’re trying to do in county government.
Let’s do it everywhere.
Until next week…
Steuart Pittman
Anne Arundel County Executive