S2 E4: Presence and Persistence in Leadership: Leading with Data, Empathy, and Heart ❤️ 💚 💛 🇬🇩

What does it mean to lead with both data and heart? In this episode, Dr. Esther C. Bubb sits down with Dr. Renisha James-Thomas, a Grenadian-born educator and Evaluation Coordinator in Texas, to explore how leadership is shaped by cultural identity, resilience, and disciplined presence. Renisha shares how her upbringing in Grenada instilled a deep sense of community, optimism, and perseverance. She explains why data should be approached with curiosity rather than judgment, and how empathy helps leaders uncover the human stories behind behavior. Key themes include: • The power of presence in leadership • Looking beyond numbers to understand context • Leading with empathy in special education • Black educator persistence and resistance • Caribbean values that shape effective leadership Memorable Quotes: • “Numbers don’t lie, but mathematicians do.” • “The moment you’re in is not the moment you’ll be in forever.” • “We likkle buh we tallawah: we are small, but we make a big impact.” About Our Guest Dr. Renisha James-Thomas is a seasoned special education leader whose career spans classroom teaching, district‑level evaluation coordination, and research on the lived experiences of Black educators. She supports one of Texas’s larger special education populations, overseeing evaluation processes for nearly 2,000 students and working alongside school psychologists, educational diagnosticians, speech‑language pathologists, occupational and physical therapists, and other service providers. Her day‑to‑day work is the real engine of the system: coordinating services, navigating difficult conversations with families, mediating disagreements, managing contracts for evaluators, and keeping timelines and compliance requirements steady in a fast‑moving environment. Renisha is known for bringing clarity, steadiness, and a sense of humanity to processes that can easily overwhelm both families and staff. As a Black educator in a state where Black professionals remain significantly underrepresented, Renisha’s leadership is shaped by both lived experience and scholarly inquiry. Her doctoral research in educational leadership examined the persistence and resistance of Black educators, how they stay, how they push back, and how they carve out space in systems not originally built with them in mind. That lens guides her work today, from mentoring new educators to advocating for equitable evaluation practices to strengthening structures that protect vulnerable students and honor the labor of the service providers who hold up special education every day. Her approach is direct, grounded, and deeply rooted in community, care, and disciplined standards.