Keynote Speaker: Rodney Robinson
National Teacher of the Year

Rodney Robinson became a teacher 19 years ago to honor his mother, who struggled to receive an education after being denied an education as a child due to segregation and poverty in rural Virginia. In 2015, Robinson started teaching at Virgie Binford Education Center, which is inside the Richmond Juvenile Detention Center. He uses a whole-child, civic-centered educational approach that promotes social-emotional growth to help his students thrive, and works to create alternative programs to divert students from the school-to-prison pipeline.

Robinson has been published three times by Yale University and has received numerous awards for his accomplishments in and out of the classroom, most notably the R.E.B. Award for Teaching Excellence. He works with Richmond city leaders and local colleges to recruit underrepresented male teachers into the field of education.