46. Jeanette Deutermann

Jeanette Deutermann is a Bellmore mom who saw wrong and is doing everything in her power to make it right. As a former teacher at an alternative high school for kids with special needs in Port Washington, she’s devoted her considerable energy as an education advocate not only to protest the degrading Common Core Learning Standards but to create the “Long Island Opt-Out” movement, which has accrued more than 16,000 members. Thanks to her efforts, the group has become instrumental in building community support for reform. She’s helped draft the template letters for individual districts that parents have used (by the thousands) to stop their children from taking New York’s unfair new standardized tests. Deutermann is also on the steering committee of the New York State Allies for Public Education, an advocacy group. Through dozens of speaking appearances at forums across the Island as well as being interviewed on television and even having a spot in the documentary film, Standardized: Lies, Money, and Civil Rights: How Testing is Ruining Public Education, she is at the forefront of a national movement against a harmful regime in public education that has put the hearts and minds of our children at risk for corporate gain.