Pia Dandiya

speaker

80 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 25 Jan

Pia Dandiya’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.

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The MeidasTouch Podcast · Trump gets Nightmare News in Florida with Shock Poll!! · 25 Jan 2026 podcast

I started having that realization when I went to college.

So I knew that I wanted to commit my life to public service to pay forward what I'm so proud that this district and this country has given me.

So I became a teacher and I wanted to focus on teaching in high poverty schools to really understand the challenges that those communities face and figure out how to be a part of the solution.

And I just deeply fell in love with the work on the ground.

I felt like there was truly no better place for me to be to understand the problems of poverty and public education than in the trenches.

So initially I thought maybe I'd go to law school or get involved in policy work, but I scrapped those plans because I knew I was exactly where I needed to be.

So I taught for a few more years, and then I got the fire under my belly to say, what if I didn't just lead in a classroom?

What if I led an entire school?

Could I actually change life trajectories for kids living below the poverty line on the public dollar?

So at the age of 28, I became a high school principal in Harlem, and I started a high school there with just one hallway, 100 kids,

10 teachers, and every year we got 100 more kids, 10 more teachers, one more hallway, until we became a fully grown school.

And we told families that if they came to this school that they had never heard of, their child would earn admission to college.

Now, this was a very big promise to make at the time, knowing that the high school down the street was graduating students from high school, forget college, at a 60% rate.

86% of my students live below the poverty line and we succeeded in getting 100% of them off to college on the public dollar with a million dollars in scholarships.

And I'm so proud of what that means for them because year over year, we built that school with blood, sweat, and tears.

And as the principal, I did everything from hiring teachers to breaking up fights if gangs are waiting for my kids.

And four years later, all of them were off to college.

The school lives beyond me now too.

So we're on to our sixth graduating class, still serving the same demographic and still getting 100% of them off to college.

I feel so strongly that we can do better.

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