CDF Leadership & Staff

Jeanne Middleton-Hairston
National Director, CDF Freedom Schools® Program

Dr. Jeanne Middleton-Hairston is the National Director of the CDF Freedom Schools Program, a summer and after-school reading enrichment program that in 2007 served more than 8,000 students at over 124 sites in 61 cities across the country. Dr. Middleton-Hairston oversees all aspects of CDF Freedom Schools programming, including curriculum development, strategies for expansion, and developing the training program for CDF Freedom Schools Servant Leader Interns, program sponsor partners and staff.

Dr. Middleton-Hairston is an accomplished educator, lecturer and community leader with over 25 years experience in public and private education. Prior to serving as a tenured Professor of Education on the faculty of Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, she worked in the Jackson Public Schools Office of Research and Evaluation. While at Millsaps, Dr. Middleton-Hairston served as Chair of the Department of Education for eleven years. She also founded the Millsaps College Principals' Institute in 1992, a leadership program that continues to provide professional development and continuing education for principals and assistant principals in Mississippi and from neighboring states.

Dr. Middleton-Hairston was one of eight black students to integrate Millsaps College (private, White and Methodist-related) and she was the first African American to be appointed to the teaching faculty there. As a co-author of the award-winning history textbook Mississippi: Conflict and Change, Dr. Middleton-Hairston was active in the struggle to create honest and appropriate texts for history instruction in America's middle and high schools.

Dr. Middleton-Hairston earned her doctorate and master's degrees in Administration, Planning, and Social Policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education; she was a political science major at Millsaps College. She is married to James M. Hairston, Jr., and is the mother of two daughters, Johnie Valeska and Valara Jeanne Forsythe, and a bonus son, J.R. Hairston.