Once, he was homeless. Now, he is Philadelphia’s school board president. Meet Reginald Streater.

Reginald Streater graduated from Germantown High in 2001, the year the state seized control of the Philadelphia School District.

On Dec. 15, he became president of the board that runs the school system, succeeding longtime board president Joyce Wilkerson, who opted not to seek another term.

His path from A to B wasn’t a straight line, but Streater, 39 — a lawyer and father of two children who attend a district school in Mount Airy — wouldn’t trade the journey.

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Born in Columbia, S.C., Streater and his family became homeless when he was 6. He vividly remembers living in a shelter then, and again in middle school, when the family moved from couch to couch without a permanent place to live.

“It was very hard to study, to do homework when you’re sharing a room with 15 to 20 other families,” Streater said. “But my mother was very much adamant about me doing my homework. Having her push me to focus on education allows me to do the things I do now. I was built up in extreme circumstances.”

His grandmother eventually moved the family to Philadelphia. It felt like a different world.

“I had never seen a rowhouse in my life,” said Steater, who now lives in Germantown.

At first, he attended private Christian schools. Then Streater moved to public school, Leeds Middle School and Germantown High, both of which have since been closed.

(”It does break my heart to drive by Germantown High School, to see it empty, to see the Ave. I feel like there’s a hole in the community that’s not been filled,” Streater said.)

A strong student, Streater played football and sang in the school choir. He participated in JROTC. Going to Germantown meant something, Streater said — students were proud of its history, of the way it looked, all brick, stone and grand columns.

“It shows how much we cared about education when buildings like Germantown were built,” Streater said. “I look at my time at Germantown as a value add.”

After graduation came 10 years “in the wilderness,” Streater said. Coming out of high school, he thought he wanted to be an architect, but that plan fizzled. He was dual enrolled at Community College of Philadelphia and Temple University, but found that the program wasn’t for him.

Streater left college and worked in restaurants, at TGI Friday’s in Willow Grove, on City Avenue and at Philadelphia International Airport, and in the old Freight House in Doylestown. Streater was bussing tables at first, but was quickly promoted to server and bartender before he was 20.

(Streater makes “an amazing cocktail,” he said. He can also flip bottles and yes, he was the guy with flare on his suspenders at Friday’s.)

Those years taught Streater much — about people, about working under pressure.

“Everything you do in life can correlate to something else. I know that I would not be as good of an attorney I am, the father I am, the board member I am, the board president that I aspire to be, if I didn’t get the hard lessons that I learned in the service industry,” Streater said.

Customers would sometimes tell him, “’We love you here, but you should be somewhere else, doing something to better the world,’” Streater recalled. “One day, I took that seriously.”

This time, college stuck. Streater earned his undergraduate degree from Temple, majoring in political science and minoring in African American studies. He found a meaningful community in the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity. He graduated magna cum laude, and since then, his path has been straight up — law school, president of the Student Bar Association and Black Law Students Association, clerkship for a federal judge and for the Pennsylvania Innocence Project, work at prominent law firms.

“I told myself if I was going to become a lawyer, I would put myself in a position to practice law in a way that helps everyone who is from the communities I’m from,” Streater said — not just the Black community, but disempowered communities in general.

That translates to his work as an employment lawyer at Berger Montague with expertise in diversity, equity and inclusion issues, Streater said, but also to his school board role; Streater was appointed to the board by Mayor Jim Kenney in 2021.

Earlier this year, Streater spent four weeks in Finland and Kenya as a U.S.A. Justice Program fellow through the Eisenhower Fellowship. His project centered on international perspectives on improving public education.

Ask Streater about what he learned abroad, and his face lights up.

Finland reveres its teachers, Streater said. Teachers are given runway and agency, leading to systems where some decision-making can be decentralized.

“How do we as a board do whatever we can in our power to empower teachers, the whole teacher, their emotional needs, their spiritual needs, their intellectual needs, so they feel supported and loved?” Streater said. “We have to find a way to empower them, to give them tools, then set them free.”

Another Finnish lesson: Move the resources where they need to go.

“It was fascinating to hear that even their well-performing schools are all neighborhood schools,” Streater said. “They work with their government to make sure that their neighborhoods stay diverse.”

In both Kenya and Finland, Streater saw firsthand the need to engage the community in decision-making, and to communicate well. In Kenya, Streater spent time with representatives of community-based organizations that did good work but were wary of the government and schools. It was eye-opening, an object lesson in the kind of trust necessary for schools and nonprofits to work together.

Streater knows that’s germane to Philadelphia’s board and the district, which have historically taken heat for ignoring or minimizing meaningful community input into decisions.

“We’ve just been kind of top down and, ‘We’ll address your concerns after the policy’s been implemented,’” Streater said.

Expect Streater to be making that point, both privately and in public. “If we’re voting on a policy around concussions, I’m going to be asking, ‘Did we talk to the student athletes?’”

Streater expressed staunch support for Tony B. Watlington Sr., who has been superintendent for six months, and said he and Mallory Fix-Lopez, the new vice president, and the rest of the board will be focused on giving Watlington what he needs to create a strategic plan, and then creating conditions so he can execute it.

No doubt: “I know that sometimes we’re going to have to make hard decisions,” Streater said.

Philadelphia student achievement still lags not just surrounding areas, but also other urban districts. The district has $5 billion in unmet capital needs and school closings could be on the table. 2023 is a mayoral election year, and the entire board’s term expires with Kenney’s.

But Streater is ready, he said, despite the scope of the issues ahead of him — and the near full-time hours his new volunteer job requires, on top of the full-time job he already has.

Streater’s children are 8 and 9, third and fourth graders at C.W. Henry in Mount Airy. They told their father that it was “cool” that he was elected board president. And though he belongs to Philadelphia’s children now, too, Streater said he’s determined not to let his kids go without.

“What I refuse to do is not give them the time and concern that they deserve,” he said. He still helps with homework, cuts his son’s hair, gets his hair twisted with his daughter.

Streater is very conscious of the image he puts forward — his locs, the dashikis he often wears.

“I’m not afraid of the fact that I am an African American man,” he said. “I think it’s important for children to see that.”