Mary Anne Lecos never intended to become involved in education.
When she attended DePaul University in Chicago in the early 1950s, she was the only female student in the economics department. She graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor of arts in economics in 1954, but not before her father told her to make sure she got her "insurance policy."
"My father was very practical. I was the first in the family to go to college," she said. "My father said to get my insurance policy, a certificate in teaching, in case I couldn't get a job as an economist."
Father knew best. Lecos was unable to find work in 1950s Chicago in her chosen field and instead began teaching on military bases, first in Morton Grove, Ill., and then Parris Island, S.C., after she married then-Marine Dan.
Lecos' insurance policy began what would be a career that spanned nearly 25 years in the Fairfax County Public Schools system dating back to 1966 and including time as a teacher's aide, School Board member and an assistant superintendent.
After retiring from the county school system in 1989, Lecos spent another 10 years working for George Mason University and is still an associate professor there.
“She has a photographic memory and I have seen very important people quiver when she started questioning them,” said Paula Johnson, former FCPS employee and current GMU coordinator of field relations for the School of Professional Development. “She is very focused, very articulate and very smart. You don’t fool around with Mary Anne.”
LECOS MADE THE MOST of her stay with the school system. After working as a part-time teacher's aide for two years and being a stay-at-home mom to five children, she accepted an appointment to the county School Board representing the Mason District. She served 10 years, including a stint as the chairman, and gave birth to two more children. In all, Lecos raised seven children and now has 12 grandchildren.
"The joke on the board was that I was trying to raise the enrollment figures single-handedly," Lecos said.
During that time, 1969-78, the board faced a growing population, aging school buildings, federal mandates to implement what would become special education, a recession, double-digit inflation and a community not always willing to approve referendums for the schools. In the 1970s, two referendums actually failed to gain support from the voters.
It was also during the 1970s that the Fairfax County School Board led the effort to create a committee that brought the area School Boards together, which became known as "MABE," Metropolitan Area Boards of Education.
"Once we got into collective bargaining, there was a tendency to whipsaw," Lecos said. "People would come to the board and say, 'Well, this county is doing this and that county is doing that.' With MABE, we attempted to get together and share notes with other school boards."
While serving on the board, Lecos earned her master's degree and had moved on to working on earning her doctorate. All the while, she served on several state boards and commissions and had a hand in shaping what would become the Standards of Quality, which she now says are outdated and need to be modified, especially in the area of special education.
"The Standards of Quality are very basic. We haven't kept up with staffing, particularly in special education," Lecos said. "Virginia has been quite delinquent in supporting its public schools."
AFTER LEAVING the School Board, Lecos developed the school system's program audit system as her doctoral topic. The system she created was used for five years to evaluate individual schools through a series of surveys and peer evaluations.
“She instigated the audit program. We didn’t have an effective way to audit back then,” said FCPS assistant schools superintendent Alan Leis. “It became a real fixture in how we evaluated ourselves.”
One of the inspirations for the project came from her experience on the board.
"While I was on the School Board, we would authorize these studies and have public hearings and set policies, but there would be no effect in the schools," Lecos said. "There was such a long time before the policies would be implemented. We decided a systematic way to make sure the policies were being implemented was needed. I left the School Board, and there still was no system."
Although the then-seated School Board decided to switch to a pay-for-performance evaluation, eliminating the need for Lecos' system, some of the surveys she created for the audit are still in use today, though modified to reflect today's issues.
Leis said Lecos was appointed chair of minority achievement task force, which was the first time anyone analyzed academic achievement by race. “It was very revolutionary,” he said.
Lecos eventually left the school system to accept the position of director of teacher education at George Mason before retiring in 1999. There she helped shape the university's educational program for teachers, including an internship program with Fairfax County. Since leaving GMU, Johnson said the school has divided the work Lecos did between two departments. Johnson headed up one of the departments.
“She’s probably one of the most multitasked persons I have ever met. She can have 50 balls in the air and not drop one,” Johnson said.
In addition, Lecos is an unpaid consultant on education, planning and organizational development for the State Department Office of Overseas Schools in South America, the Mediterranean and the Middle East, as well as for other education groups in the United States and abroad.