Our Founders
David Domenici
Co-Founder
David Domenici is currently the Executive Director of Breakfree Education. David has been working with opportunity and justice involved youth for over 20 years. In 1997, he quit his job as a corporate lawyer, and along with James Forman Jr., started the See Forever Foundation and the Maya Angelou Public Charter School. Over the next 10 years David served as the organization’s Executive Director, as well as the Principal of its initial campus. In 2007, Maya Angelou Schools was asked to take over the school at Oak Hill, Washington, DC’s long term juvenile correctional facility. David designed the school program, hired all the staff, and became the founding Principal of the school, called the Maya Angelou Academy. David left the Maya Angelou Academy in the fall of 2011 to start the Center for Educational Excellence in Alternative Settings. David is an Ashoka and Echoing Green Fellow, and is a graduate of Stanford Law School and the University of Virginia.
James Forman, Jr.
Co-Founder
James Forman Jr. is a Clinical Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Prof. Forman is a graduate of Atlanta’s Roosevelt High School, Brown University, and Yale Law School, and was a law clerk for Judge William Norris of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of the United States Supreme Court. After clerking, he joined the Public Defender Service in Washington, D.C., where for six years he represented both juveniles and adults charged with crimes. During his time as a public defender, Professor Forman became frustrated with the lack of education and job training opportunities for his clients. So in 1997, along with David Domenici, he started the Maya Angelou Public Charter School, an alternative school for school dropouts and youth who had previously been arrested. Professor Forman teaches and writes in the areas of criminal procedure and criminal law policy, constitutional law, juvenile justice, and education law and policy. His particular interests are schools, prisons, and police, and those institutions’ race and class dimensions. With the support of the Open Society Foundations, Professor Forman is currently writing a book about African-American attitudes towards crime and punishment in the age of mass incarceration.
Dr. Clarisse Mendoza Davis
Chief Executive Officer
Dr. Clarisse Mendoza Davis is the Chief Executive Officer of the Maya Angelou Schools and the See Forever Foundation. Prior to her appointment as the CEO, she served as Chief of Schools for the organization. Dr. Mendoza Davis has served students and families in urban schools in both traditional district and charter settings since 2006.
After teaching high school English in the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS), Clarisse served as Principal of Tindley Renaissance Academy in Indianapolis, Indiana, Chief Operating Officer of the Early Stages Division of DCPS, and Deputy Chief of Schools at the UNO Charter School Network (now the Acero Network of Schools) in Chicago, Illinois.