Deborah Williams

Deborah Williams is an award-winning educator with 33 years teaching experience.  An honor graduate of Virginia State University in Petersburg, Virginia where she earned her Bachelor of Science degree in Elementary Education, she became a teacher of language arts and later secondary English. Her attention to detail and administrative tendencies were noted by various building level administrators in all of her teaching locations where she was chosen to serve as, among other positions, department chairman, team leader, grade-level chairman, and gifted resource teacher. Her administrative skills were refined when she earned a Master’s degree in Educational Administration from The College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia.  Her interest and pursuit of stronger writing skills and better teaching of writing were realized when she was chosen as a student fellow for the Eastern Virginia Writing Project at William and Mary and as a participant in Project W.R.I.T. & E., a part of the National Diffusion Network in Glassboro, New Jersey.

Within one of the schools where she worked, she established innovative and successful instructional strategies that were designed to help its at-risk population. When she took over the helm as chairman, her challenged school’s test scores were well under the state’s expectations.  Under her instructional leadership, student test scores rose incrementally for years until the English department met and exceeded the state’s minimum benchmarks for 6 out of the 10 years that she chaired the department. Her ideas on how to implement the curriculum were successful and became the model for writing review and test preparation across the school division.  Ms. Williams was the recipient of two teaching awards, The R.E.B. Award for Teaching Excellence (Greater Richmond Area) and The Gilman Award (for Teaching Excellence in Henrico County Public Schools).  Her other awards include Outstanding Young Women in America, Who’s Who in the South and Southeast, Who’s Who in America, and America’s Registry of Outstanding Professionals.

Her work as an educator continues after her retirement from teaching.  Currently, Ms. Williams serves as an instructional coach and curriculum reviewer for a local school division.  At the same time, she has been tutoring students from ages 5 - 18 in various subjects, including reading, writing, general math, study skills, and SAT Prep (essay, critical reading, sentence completion, and grammar portions). She has since launched, Knowledge Quest Online Tutoring, her own online tutoring business in the Richmond, Virginia area. Further, her community service work includes her current term as president of Boy Scout Troop 732 Committee in Glen Allen, Virginia and vice president of the Henrico Retired School Personnel Association.  She has created an comprehensive, yearlong rites of passage program for adolescent boys in churches.  She administers the program for a church in Richmond.