Dr. LaTonya M. Goffney is in her seventh year as the Superintendent of Aldine ISD.
What began as a teaching career in 1999, a year before her generation believed the world would come to an end, now has her at the helm of 58,000 students—and the Y2K joke has long disappeared from public memory.
“I do believe God definitely has a sense of humor when it comes to my life. There’s nothing about my past that would’ve predicted that I’d be sitting here with the Defender asking me a question about my life as a superintendent,” she said. “It didn’t start out that way.”
Goffney grew up in Coldspring, Texas, where people “did not look like” her, but that is precisely what she loved about her small town. She remembers having experienced no racial tension or “pointing fingers,” and people always lent a helping hand.
“Everybody spoke to everybody. Everybody took care of everybody,” she said.
Goffney’s life has not been easy
Goffney is one of the 1.4% Black women superintendents in the country and she believes it’s a hard job, irrespective of race.
“I do recognize that as a Black woman. I try not to point it out often because every district that I’ve been in celebrated the fact that I was their first Black superintendent. I don’t even want to hear about it,” she said. “I want to be the best.”
Goffney’s mother was only 15 when she gave birth to her and did not know who the father was. Growing up in a chaotic household where she was a witness to her mother’s drug use, Goffney credits her for doing the best she could with what she had.
While her childhood was chaotic, her school was a safe haven.
“Perhaps the thing that made the biggest difference for me was my experience at school,” she said. “I had great teachers.”
She remembers all of their names. Goffney reminisced about them, counting them off on her hands. She said her school gave her positive reinforcement for doing well on simple things, sometimes even a spelling test or performing well on a test. Her teachers soon realized her talents and placed her in gifted and talented.
At school, they treated me like I was smart. And I never heard that I was smart. At home, it was chaos. At school, there was order.
Dr. Goffney
In the fifth grade, her life became “unfortunately terrible,” and she moved in with her grandparents, Rebecca and Walter McGowan.
Goffney says it changed her life. Her grandfather mowed lawns for a living, and her grandmother cleaned the house for a white family in their locality. They never studied beyond the fifth grade. Her grandfather, who could not read or write, always signed his name with an ‘X.’
“And he said, ‘LaTonya, if you can read, you can go anywhere,’” Goffney said. “My grandparents taught me the value of hard work. And perhaps that is the one thing that nobody can take away is hard work.”
Today, she dedicates the “M” in her name to her grandparents, who did not get access to high school or college, and the two people she hopes she makes proud daily.
“That’s why I like to do the work that I do because I recognize that I wasn’t born on third base,” Goffney said. “But when I say that’s where the magic happened, for me, school was magical. I’m living out loud the power of education…”
Her lived experiences inspire her to be a figure of support for the students in the schools she leads. In Aldine ISD, a district with 84.5% at-risk, 91.19% economically disadvantaged, and 47.38% emergent bilingual students, Goffney wants them to understand the power of education. Under her leadership, however, the district increased overall average daily attendance by 1.3% and reduced chronic absenteeism by 7%.
“That’s what I want to teach students in our district who may be experiencing challenges at home and things you can’t even imagine…physical abuse to the different challenges of poverty,” she said. “Education is the only long-term solution to a lot of problems that we’re trying to solve today.”
In her family, too, she changed the trajectory of relatives after her cousins graduated college.
“Dr. Goffney not only pushes herself to be better but stretches everyone around her. The bar is always being raised, and the vision is ever expanding,” said Dr. Rhonda Mason, President of the Houston Area Alliance of Black School Educators. “Winning, hard work, adaptability, and resilience are in her DNA. Her grandmother, Mrs. Rebecca, modeled being independent and self-sufficient while caring for others. LaTonya has followed in her footsteps while simultaneously creating her own legacy.”
Goffney’s career began with a sturdy education
A 3.89 GPA.
The number has been ingrained in Goffney’s mind since she was a senior. She was excited to graduate high school and be among the top 10 students from her class, but she planned to enroll in the U.S. Navy because she could not afford further studies. During that time, her mother was missing, too.
Her grandparents, forever encouraging, wanted to help but had never navigated a college experience and did not have access to loans. “They just were proud that I was gonna graduate from high school, ”Goffney remembers.
However, her counselor, Ms. Allen, and calculus teacher, Mr. Ashley, upon learning her plans, held an intervention during class to convince her to go to college instead. They also helped her complete her FAFSA form.
“I could go to any college in the whole state and didn’t know,” she said. “That’s why it’s also important that our students have the information they need to make the choices they need to make.”
She received the Pell Grant scholarship, among others, and attended Sam Houston State University for her bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate degrees. Her PhD dissertation was on the “Perceptions of Race and Gender in the Superintendency: A Feminist Poststructural Narrative Inquiry of an African American, Hispanic, and White Novice Female Superintendent.”
In between, she worked as a correctional officer in Huntsville before starting her career in education.
Goffney taught eighth-grade language arts for three years and then served as an Assistant Principal at Lincoln Junior High for two years. She then went to Coldspring Intermediate School and then returned to Lincoln Junior High as its principal.
She became the Superintendent of Coldspring-Oakhurst ISD in 2008, Lufkin ISD in 2013, and finally, Aldine ISD in 2018.
“I’ve had the chance to work with Dr. Goffney, first in Lufkin and now in Aldine,” said Sheila Adams, Aldine ISD Chief of Communications. “She’s always been all about the students. She’s the kind of person who pushes you to do your best—not just for yourself, but because the students depend on you.”
Currently, Goffney is the President of the National Alliance of Black School Educators (NABSE) and the intermediate past president of the Texas Association of School Administrators. She has also received awards and honors, like the Superintendent of the Year by the Texas Association of School Boards in 2017 and a finalist for the 2020 Superintendent Award by The School Superintendents Association. In 2021, the Association of Latino Administrators and Superintendents (ALAS) honored her with the organization’s inaugural National Champions of Equity Award, and in 2022, Goffney was named a Top 30 Women in Houston honoree and the recipient of The Latino Learning Center’s Humanitarian Award.
Goffney says the role of leadership matters greatly in a field like education and that a superintendent should not rely solely on it. For her, it is seeing her students learn and knowing she has created opportunities for them.
“In each district, we’ve done some incredible work, putting our heads together and thinking strategically about how we manifest the vision and mission for the district,” Goffney said.
Today, she believes representation in every field is important to inspire young people who see themselves in leadership roles and caregivers who give it their all to educate them.
