Saturday, March 21st, 2026
Staggs Community Room
Huntsville Public Library
10:30 AM
Hybrid Meeting
DR. JANELL DRONE​
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MEET JANELL
Dr. Janell Drone is a visionary educator and international curriculum expert whose career spans primary, secondary, and higher education in segregated and integrated schools across rural, suburban, urban, public, and private international settings. A native Texan educated at Columbia University, she bridges local history with global scholarship, synthesizing African American educational history with contemporary standards of teaching, learning, and assessment.
Beginning in the classroom, she advanced to district leadership in New York, serving as District Director of Multicultural Education, Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum and Instruction, and Interim Superintendent. At the New York State Education Department, she worked as a Senior Associate Curriculum and Assessment Policy Analyst, leading a statewide PreK–12 multicultural curriculum and assessment initiative and superintendent professional development. Her IB dissertation work helped embed African perspectives into a program now used by thousands of schools in more than 150 countries.
Today, Dr. Drone is a preeminent scholar of African American educational landscapes. At the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library—recognized worldwide for unparalleled collections on Black history and culture—she leads archival research on “separate but equal” one-room and related school facilities in Delaware, Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, and Washington, DC, preserving their architectural, cultural, and community legacies.
Her work also includes research at Columbia University’s Avery Library on African American architects of cultural facilities, as well as convening Hunter College’s 50th anniversary Brown v. Board of Education symposium, whose content informed New York State Regents and Advanced Placement social studies curricula. She has advised and coached numerous doctoral students and served as a rater for national principal and superintendent licensure examinations.
Dr. Drone’s ongoing projects integrate one-room school architectural details—roofs, doors, windows, floors—as evidence of bias and equity in cultural facilities, and use both traditional archival methods and AI-assisted analysis. Her grant-writing has supported playground access, school safety, special education, and other inclusive initiatives emphasizing diversity, equity, and family and pet friendly environments.
Her professional practice promotes web-based, multimedia, and culturally responsive learning that foregrounds social-emotional development, self-advocacy, global consciousness, justice, and community resilience.
Dr. Drone’s memberships include the Walker County Genealogical Society and Walker County Public Library. She is NAACP and Deta Sigma Theta Sorority (Life Member). Other affiliations include: The Abyssinian Baptist Church (New York), the National Museum of Kenya, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) New York’s Cultural Facilities Committee, New York Public Library archives, and multiple archival and other national museum organizations.
She is the author of books, articles, and media critic on multicultural education, assessment, technology in higher education, and African American one-room schools, as well as recipient of multiple grants from CUNY, Hunter College, New York City–DOE collaborations, and the Rockefeller Foundation.
PURPOSE DRIVEN AFRICAN AMERICAN ONE ROOM SCHOOL FACILITIES IN THREE ORIGINALTHIRTEEN COLONY STATE'S: DELAWARE, SOUTH CAROLINA AND VIRGINIA
One-Room School formation is the original construction that housed formalized learning, for millions of rural and African Americans - transitioning from systemic captive and unfree conditions imposed on their communities or Indigenous Nations lands confiscated. Consequently, One-Room schools became crucial learning facilities and quality assurance paths - leading to “self determination and collective empowerment in racialized segregated society[1]”. This also means that shared desire for learning would drive the first great mass movement of unfree Blacks from no-schooling to one-room and rural schools throughout Southern states in America.
In the state of Delaware, One-Room facilities in particular developed many significant (though invisible) structural assets. The research under review makes known some of the critical funding resources beginning with a 1778 Will - directing funds be made available to erect a ‘Colored’ School Building. Consequently, some of the most distinguished building and ground facilities trend recovery and analysis is reported in the research presented today.
Thusly, concerning school facilities, many challenging explanations and schedules are recounted strategically on two accounts. The first reveals data from archival records - distinguishing aspirants struggle to secure free learning spaces. Second, that research analysis devotes critical attention to consolidating knowledge concerning school facilities and funding mechanisms that qualify them co-existing as learning infrastructural essentials. Additionally, the research explains (sequentially) why securing adequate learning spaces and funding equity needs to be written persistently as scholarship with other education activism - best practice evidence.
Subsequently, what emerges in this One-Room School study, is an opportunity to merge the two organizational structures (facilities and funding) with One-Room architectural construct compositions - showing them functioning as fundamental team operatives. To this end, introducing facilities and funding as infrastructural cohorts pivots the discussion from “how” to “where” learning was configured for rural and African Americans after reconstruction, and by extension still existing today.
[1] Ellen Sanworth, (Ph.D. diss., University of Delaware Library, Special Collection, June 17, 1936); Negro Education in Delaware, there is one real blot on Delaware’s care of her children educationally, her care of her “negro” children. Under the care of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, founded by Dr. Thomas Bray, June 16, 1701, gave special attention to instruction for the slaves and other ignorant persons. The “negros” themselves made an effort to educate their children before 1846, but as late as 1866 there were only seven schools for colored children in the State.
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