Donna M. Hargens

Dr. Donna Hargens is a distinguished educator, driven by her commitment to public education and the unwavering belief that every child can learn. As superintendent of the nation’s 28th largest school district with 172 schools and a budget of $1.3 billion a year, Dr. Hargens serves more than 101,000 JCPS District students and nearly 17,000 teachers and staff.

Noted throughout her career for transparency and collaboration, Dr. Hargens joined JCPS in 2011 and quickly brought the community together for an ongoing series of meetings called The Superintendent’s Summit. While Dr. Hargens and her staff sought to demystify matters of great public interest like student assignment, parents and other community leaders also had the opportunity to ask tough questions and provide valuable feedback. These informative and candid forums set the stage for Dr. Hargens and the Jefferson County Board of Education (JCBE) to spearhead the district’s strategic plan, which has produced significant gains since 2012 in academic proficiency, the graduation rate, and the percentage of JCPS students who are college- and career-ready.

The vision behind JCPS’s Project Proficiency led U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan to choose Dr. Hargens as “The Featured Superintendent” at the 2012 National School Turnaround Summit. In 2013, Business First named her the “2013 Enterprising Woman Making a Difference.”

As a passionate public servant, Dr. Hargens is honored to serve on the boards of directors for several of Louisville’s venerable organizations. These include Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer’s Safe and Healthy Neighborhoods Advisory Committee, the Fund for the Arts, the Kentucky Science Center, the Muhammad Ali Center, StageOne Family Theatre, and Greater Louisville Inc.

As a child growing up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Dr. Hargens loved to read and was determined to become a teacher, which meant being the first in her family to graduate from college. As valedictorian of her high school class, she earned a scholarship to Marquette University and a bachelor of arts degree in 1979. For eight years, she taught Spanish and English in Lomira, Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee, before moving to North Carolina and rising through the academic ranks of the Wake County Public School system, the nation’s 18th largest district with 143,000 students.

After receiving a master of education degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1988, Dr. Hargens became an assistant principal and later served as a principal for more than a decade. As an assistant superintendent, she earned a doctorate in education from Seton Hall University in 2005.

Prior to her appointment as JCPS superintendent, Dr. Hargens was the interim superintendent and chief academic officer for Wake County Public Schools, in Raleigh, NC, where she focused on reinventing struggling schools and led unprecedented gains in academic achievement.