Now that Mr. Ratliff has retired from being the security guard at St. Stephen’s and St. Agnes after nearly 14 years, Frank Powers has taken his position.
Mr. Powers was born and raised on Long Island, New York, and has one older brother. JV Field Hockey and girls lacrosse players may recognize the last name Powers, as Coach John Powers is Mr. Powers’ older brother. As a kid, Mr. Powers worked at a supermarket with many of his friends. Mr. Powers then went to college at Marist University in upstate New York, where he majored in political science.
Out of college, Mr. Powers moved to the Alexandria area and was a police officer with the U.S. Capitol Police for four years. While being with the US Capitol Police, he saw many famous politicians, such as Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden.
Mr. Powers has known Mr. Ratliff for over 33 years. They met during the time he worked as an officer while Mr. Ratliff was a detective. When Mr. Ratliff left his detective job to come to SSSAS, he and Mr. Powers stayed in contact, and Mr. Ratliff told him about this job opening now that he was retiring, which is how Mr. Powers arrived at SSSAS.
Outside of working here, Mr. Powers has a hobby of taking pictures. It started when he took a photo of the sun coming up over the water and posted it to Facebook. People all over the app were saying that it was a really great photo, so he decided to continue with it, taking photos of different scenes. He has sold a few to his friends and has been offered to make a coffee table book of photos of Alexandria. He has also been offered spots at art galleries for some of his work.
Lastly, he would like for students to know that he is approachable and if they ever need help with anything, he would be more than willing to help, and if he can’t, he will help you find someone who can.
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Ms. Chanel Johnson was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. In middle school, she moved to Towson, Maryland. In high school, she loved math and science, especially the logic of how they all work together. She wasn’t sure if she would enjoy it, but it clicked for her.
She said, “I ended up really enjoying it just because it felt like a puzzle to me, and I think that’s what I really enjoy about computer science.”
After high school, she went to Brown University in Rhode Island, where she studied computer science. During college, she was a teaching assistant, which she says was the time when she learned to explain concepts in different ways, whether it’s visually or using analogies.
While in college, she also interned at Meta during breaks. She credits this experience as why she was easily able to get hired with them immediately after school. She started at Facebook University, which was an underrepresented minority program where interns were not allowed to touch the Facebook code. Despite this, she loved working there because of the culture. In her second year, she was a software engineer intern, and she got to work hands-on with the Facebook code. She loved the people and the culture at the time, and also got used to working with the codebase with meta.
She said, “Each internship was a practice for when I became older. Then I got used to what was expected of me, and I was able to have a much smoother transition.”
She worked at Meta for almost five years, but left because of the change in work environment. She said that the culture changed a lot, and it became more competitive and cutthroat. She said, “Company culture matters a lot to me, and this wasn’t the same company I came into.”
After leaving the company, she taught computer science part-time. She loved being able to start a passion in students for coding and helping them overcome difficult concepts. This year, she is teaching AP computer science principles, and next year, she will be teaching cybersecurity. She is especially excited about teaching cybersecurity because she took it in college, and she is ready to see students tackle the rigor. She says, “I want to prep [students] more, not just about the material but how they have these skills for college.”
Currently, she lives in DC with her partner and plans to adopt a cat. She had a beta fish named Casper for two years, but unfortunately, he passed away last year.
