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| Affiliation | Nonpartisan |
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| Name | Lemuel E. Harrison, Jr. |
| Address |
Columbus, Ohio , United States |
| Email | None |
| Website | None |
| Born |
00, 1957
(68 years)
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| Contributor | Thomas Walker |
| Last Modifed | Thomas Walker
Oct 26, 2009 05:24pm |
| Tags |
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| Info | Harrison has never held public office but understands the importance of education, he said.
He was raised by his mother, who was a civilian Air Force procurement officer, in a lower-middle-class family in Washington, D.C. His relatives had no thought of attending college. But today, Harrison is an attorney and an administrator at the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services.
"No one gave me a head start," he said, adding that his story shows "anything can be done by anyone."
He is 52, is married and has two children. One is a junior at Columbus Alternative High School, the other a junior at Columbia University in New York who went to Columbus School for Girls. Harrison lives on the East Side.
After graduating from high school in 1975, Harrison worked at Sears as a clerk and shelf-stocker for five years. In his school, "there was no expectation for any of us to go to college," he said.
He realized that all the Sears managers he worked with had college degrees, so he started taking classes at a community college. His decision in 1979 to join the Air Force eventually led to his law degree from the University of Dayton.
"I just decided I could do what the lawyers were doing" when he was training to be a court reporter in the Air Force, he said. After law school, he landed a job as an assistant Franklin County prosecutor in the juvenile division before deciding to seek a state job.
Harrison wants the district to be financially stable, and he would use his interest in databases to analyze trends about students leaving for charter schools to try to stem the tide. He would like to see a system in which parents could log into a Web-based computer system and follow their children's progress in school: tests, grades and homework assignments.
"I'd like to see data being used to get most of the students to the point that they could graduate," he said.
"It doesn't surprise me that he would be running for school board," said Patricia Fountain, 54, a fellow member of Central Seventh-day Adventist Church.
Harrison speaks frequently about educational issues, Fountain said.
"He is a very soft-spoken person, but I also think he has opinions and he has ideas that are worth listening to. He really wants to see kids educated so they can lead."
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