Experienced. Bold. Independent.
Parent. Principal. Teacher.
Jessica comes from a family of public school teachers. Her mother and father worked as elementary school teachers in the Chicagoland area for their entire 35+ year careers. Her brother is a special education teacher.
Given all of the early years she spent in and around schools and school politics, Jessica thought she would pursue a path outside of education. But following an undergraduate internship working with young people at Alternatives, Inc. in the Uptown neighborhood, Jessica decided she wanted to use her skills and talents in education.
Jessica joined Teach For America as a pathway to enter the classroom. Moving to the Bay Area of California, she taught at Richmond High School as a Special Education Teacher. It was here that she first recognized the stark inequities between the public education system she experienced as a student and the one her students experienced. As she recognized the gap in support for her students’ basic literacy development, she worked with her fellow teachers and administrators to receive training in research-based literacy interventions and implemented a tiered reading intervention system at Richmond High.
As Jessica recognized the critical need to support students’ literacy development earlier in their educational journey, she chose to move to one of Richmond High’s feeder middle schools, where she again partnered with administration to ensure all students had access to the literacy support they needed. It was here that Jessica started to feel the impact that a school leader could have on a whole school community. She also felt the tug to come back home to Chicago.
Jessica then spent a year in Cambridge, MA at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. Here she earned an Education Master’s in School Leadership and worked as a principal intern in Boston Public Schools to prepare her for school leadership in Chicago. Jessica began her career in Chicago Public Schools as a resident principal at Canter Middle School in Hyde Park learning under CPS greats Dr. Colleen Conlan-Carter, Sabrina Gates, John Price and Eric Pruitt.
Jessica was appointed principal at Edmund Burke Elementary School on July 21, 2012. Burke had experienced decades of disinvestment, significant and regular turnover of leadership and had found itself on probation for nearly a decade before Jessica became principal. While Jessica had just 3 short weeks before students returned from the summer, she set to work engaging families and teachers in making sure that everyone experienced the school differently on the first day. Jessica put her beliefs into action as she prioritized building a sense of trust, community and belonging in the school.
The work paid off, as over her tenure, Jessica more than doubled the size of the student body, incorporated a Child Parent Center to support Burke’s youngest learners, tripled the size of the school’s staff, intentionally engaged parents and community in the life of the school and ultimately moved the school off of probation in 2018. For this work, Jessica was recognized by the Bronzeville Community Action Council, the Bronzeville Alliance, the Southeast Chicago Commission and the Mayor of Chicago.
Today, Jessica continues her commitment to community schools through her work with the Southwest Organizing Project where she has led the development and implementation of the Southwest System of Care and Healthy Southwest in partnership with more than a dozen other community-based organizations, healthcare and social service institutions and the Chicago Department of Public Health.
Importantly, Jessica is now a CPS Parent. She married her husband, Earl Grandberry this past fall, and when she did so, she also married their daughter, Claire. Claire enthusiastically attends Galileo Scholastic Academy, a CPS magnet school in the Little Italy Neighborhood. The Biggs-Grandberry family resides in Bronzeville and all are excited about Jessica’s new venture into public life and educational leadership.