PLP 08 Profile: Stella Edwards

Name:   Stella Y. Edwards
Born: Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and lived in Louisiana until after graduating from college
Current Digs: Chesterfield County
Occupation: Substitute Teacher/ Advocate for Quality  Health, Education and Welfare of Children
Favorite part about the job: The excitement of taking on an unknown challenge each day
Your first job ever? During high school, caring for an elderly widower.
Favorite book?  Who Moved My Cheese?
Favorite movie?  Yental
Comfort food?  California Navel Orange
What's in your car CD player right now? Music from the Broadway musical, Rent.
Next journey? National PTA Board of Directors meeting.
Favorite Virginia vacation spot? Northern Virginia ( a place of all seasons).
First political memory? 1966, East Baton Rouge Parish chapter of the National Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers (NCCPT), advocating for equality in segregated public schools.
Whom do you admire and why? Clara Gay, president of then National Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers.  Mrs. Gay led the unification of the NCCPT and the National PTA (all white membership) in 1970.  I have the utmost reverence for leaders who can exercise the “just right” diplomacy to bring peoples together for the greater cause.
Best advice you ever got?  Be quick to listen.
If you could have dinner with any one currently living, whom would it be and why? I would have dinner with Senator Hillary Clinton, several years after her term(s) as President of the United States.  I would like to hear her account of modern day history in the US from her personal viewpoint.
Describe a perfect day.  Receiving a phone call at 6:00 a.m. to substitute at 7:00 a.m., anticipating all the unknowns of the school climate, students temperament, and the uncertainty of prepared lesson plans, and at the end of the day the feeling of success!
One thing most people might be surprised to learn about you? I attended paratrooper school, to learn to jump out of a perfectly good airplane.
Ambition, political or otherwise?  To have a major influence on laws and policies affecting the health, education and welfare of children through decision-making positions.