Humility as Strategy

Profile: Monique Darrisaw-Akil 

Some days, Monique Darrisaw-Akil, superintendent of Uniondale Union Free School District on New York’s Long Island, walks the four miles from her home to her office. Like the beat cops in her native Brooklyn, she greets, community members and families.

The walks remind her the school district isn’t the only ”big dog in town,” as she puts it. Faith-based institutions, businesses, firehouses and libraries all play key roles.

“School districts should come from a place of humility,” says Darrisaw-Akil, who received the Effie Jones Humanitarian Award at AASA’s 2026 national conference. “We are one part of this ecosystem that should be working together for a common interest. And that’s not just kids doing well and achievement, it’s about community thriving.”

In her five years as Uniondale’s superintendent, Darrisaw-Akil has deployed a community-centered leadership philosophy inspired partly by her father, a pastor who was constantly serving the community. “The idea that service and leadership isn’t about people coming to us, but it’s about us going out to them is something I was raised with,” she says.

Embedding herself in Uniondale has helped her uncover better ways to support students, Darrisaw-Akil says. She had assumed most families in the 5,700-student suburban district had cars. So she was surprised, during a bookbag giveaway, to see families walking to distribution sites pushing shopping carts, mainly because they didn’t have a vehicle.

“It just made me rethink how we provide services, how we do family outreach, how we ensure that the programs that we provide are meeting families where they are financially,” she says.

The community-centered approach extends to students. Instead of reserving membership in her superintendent’s student council for only top students, she charged principals with appointing students from every background, including English language learners and those with disciplinary issues.

“It’s about creating school cultures where kids are empowered, and they’re seen for the individuals they are,” she says.

Bilal Polson, principal of the district’s Northern Parkway Elementary School, says Darrisaw-Akil is actively engaged across the district’s schools, building genuine relationships with faculty, staff and students. She ensures she is approachable.

“They see her as the help and not the harm,” Polson says of community members. “If Dr. Darrisaw-Akil is here, that means something good is about to happen.”

This inclusive approach has helped target local policies that no longer work. During one student council conversation, as students discussed their Advanced Placement classes, a 9th-grade boy asked what an AP class was. That moment prompted Darrisaw-Akil to revamp how the district identifies potential AP students, which had been majority girls, and launch a marketing push that puts posters of high school athletes in AP courses in front of younger students, showing them it’s possible.

Over the last three years, male AP enrollment is growing, and that 9th grader now is an AP Scholar headed to college. After three decades in education, Darrisaw-Akil says this way of leading has made the work deeply rewarding.

“Being able to see the impact of your work in real time, knowing that your leadership matters to kids, to families and just being able to be in a position to transform the economic outcomes for an entire family, an entire community, because of some of the programming and policies we put in place,” she says, “it’s so affirming.”

Sarah Hall is a freelance education writer in Raleigh, N.C.