On a mild August Sunday, Principal Paulette Williams brought about 50 people together at Sanders BBQ Supply Co. in Chicago’s Beverly neighborhood. It was just over two weeks before the start of the 2024-25 school year for Chicago Public Schools (CPS), including Johnnie Colemon Academy. The attendees were what Paulette calls Colemon Academy’s “framily” — friends and family — and they were there to kick off the school year while enjoying each other’s company.
Parents and guardians filled out student forms at umbrella-shaded picnic tables on Sanders’ large outdoor patio. Children played games while adults laughed. A local artist showed his work at one end of the turfed space while sporting a black T-shirt that simply featured the words “Be Great.”
“We are there to show each other some love, laugh, and have fun as a community,” Paulette wrote in an email to The Fund leading up to the event. “I love [social-emotional learning] for children and adults so you may see us laughing a lot.”
The school district had provided money for back-to-school events the previous year, but with funding in question in 2024, she called on her community to help. “I began to ask my neighborhood and a few CPS and non-CPS vendors and parents to assist with continuing my passion (Bringing Community Together and GIVING BACK),” she wrote. The community delivered on that Sunday.
Aside from holding annual back-to-school events where families can fill out student forms and come together as a community, Paulette also encourages parents and guardians to spend the first three hours at Colemon Academy on day one of every school year. This allows them to have fun and ensure that everyone’s expectations are clear at the outset, she says.
Paulette is big on parent and guardian involvement in the school. “One of my biggest blessings is that I have remarkable parents that have bought into my repetitive, annual rhetoric — ‘Don’t enter this school believing that the children you gave birth to are your only children. ALL THESE KIDS BELONG TO US,’” she wrote in the email to The Fund. Parents lead school activities throughout the year, bring treats for the staff, and donate school supplies for all students to use. “When we ask for 100% parent participation, they show up and show out,” Paulette wrote. “I am still in awe of the greatness that I am surrounded by.”
This sentiment seems to be shared by Colemon’s staff and students. In the school’s 2024 5Essentials survey, they rated the school as “very strong” in the Involved Families category, the highest rank possible. The school is also considered “well-organized for improvement,” the highest overall rating for a school in the 5Essentials school improvement system.
Principal Williams has an undeniably calm demeanor, which may come naturally, or may be the result of her 16 years as the leader of Colemon Academy — an earned comfortability. With 2024-25 being her 17th year there, it might be a surprise that Paulette hadn’t planned on a career in education.
“I never wanted to be a principal, and I never wanted to be a teacher,” she says of her career trajectory. “Can you imagine that?” she continues, laughing. After college, she ended up getting her teaching certificate, but she waited two years before starting that part of her career, saying that she did not think she had the patience to work with children.
She had been prepared for the classroom by a mentor, though. One of her high school coaches was also involved in the Upward Bound program at the University of Chicago and encouraged her to take advantage of it. While she started going there for tutoring and extracurricular opportunities, she eventually began tutoring other students. It wasn’t obvious to Paulette that this would ultimately lead her into education, but she sees a clear line from this experience to her current position.
That coach and mentor, Dr. Larry Hawkins, also provided her with a valuable approach to working with children. “His philosophy was, you use some tool to make sure you get kids to where you wanted them to be,” she says. “And so his tool was sports.” Dr. Hawkins would not allow his student-athletes to play sports if they did not focus on academics first. Paulette uses that trade-off approach to incentivize students to this day. “Hey . . . I’ll do something that you want, and then you do something that I want,” she says. It is not just sports, either. She has formed extracurricular clubs at the request of students based on their interests, but they can only participate if they focus in the classroom.
The classroom, it turned out, is where another of Paulette’s passions lies. After putting it off for two years, she started teaching at Carnegie Elementary and found that she loved working face to face with students. Eventually, she would become a math resource teacher, and CPS later hired her to be the Area 18 Math and Science Coach. In that role, Paulette provided professional development for teachers at 32 schools on the Far South Side and Southeast Side of Chicago, including Colemon Academy. While this fed her love for math and science instruction — and also gave her more experience in reading instruction through collaborating with phenomenal and extremely knowledgeable reading coaches — she missed working with children and decided to move on.
After one year as an assistant principal in at Carver Primary in Altgeld Gardens (coincidentally, Paulette points out, this was where Dr. Hawkins had coached the 1963 IHSA State Championship), she became the principal of Johnnie Colemon Academy. Even though she is an administrator, Paulette still values classroom time with teachers and students. “I don’t want to ask teachers to do anything that I’m not willing to sit by them — side by side — and do myself,” she says about her approach. “But they have to see that. They’ve got to feel the authenticity of that happening. And then, teachers — they’ll do anything you ask them to do.”
Though her career is not the one she envisioned when she was younger, there seems to be a sense of inevitability ribboned through the way Paulette talks about her path to the principalship. Her grandfather, another prominent influence in her life, was fond of saying, “Not my will, but Thy will be done,” a recurrent line in the gospels of the Bible.
Aside from this philosophy — a giving in to the flow or desire of something larger than us — Paulette’s temperament also seems to have led her to where she is. She realized years ago that she enjoys working with children and empowering teachers and other staff, and she loves a good challenge, she says. Her passion for bringing parents, guardians, and the broader community together to support all students at Colemon may also have come from her large family. Her grandparents had 13 children, and Paulette is one of 52 cousins — a loving community unto themselves.
When talking to Principal Williams, in other words, you get the sense that she is right where she was meant to be. “I’ve never been disappointed; I’ve always been excited,” she says of her career, and she was more than ready for the start of the 2024-25 school year. “You can tell I’m so excited. We already had an activity together already on a Sunday, right?” she said, referring to the school-year kickoff at Sanders BBQ. “I’m excited, and [the community is] excited too. They showed up!”