October Breakfast Meeting

About the speaker:
Dr. Linda Arms Gilbert, Director of Murfreesboro City Schools, is a native of Rutherford County. From 2004 until 2010, she was a tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership at Middle Tennessee State University, and she remains on the faculty in an adjunct position. At MTSU, she taught graduate and undergraduate classes in curriculum and instruction and in administration and supervision. She was also the Coordinator of the Middle Tennessee P-16 Council (a consortium of educators and community/business representatives from twenty school districts across the mid-state area), President of the Middle Tennessee Chapter of Phi Delta Kappa and the Middle Tennessee State University Education Association, the first Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Fellow at MTSU, and a mentor in the Center for the Advancement of Research and Scholarship. She received the MTSU Foundation’s Outstanding Teacher Award and Public Service Award as well as the Tennessee Board of Regents state public service award. At MTSU, she served on the board of fifteen community organizations; authored more than seven million dollars in grants, and presented at international, national, and state conferences.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              
In January, Linda left MTSU to return to Murfreesboro City Schools.  Linda has a fifty-year relationship with Murfreesboro City, having been a student at Mitchell-Neilson, President of the Mitchell-Neilson Elementary and Mitchell-Neilson Primary PTO’s, Tennessee Teacher of the Year while a music teacher at Black Fox, and Associate Director for Instruction and Professional Development for the district for six years. Since turning her focus again to Murfreesboro City, she has become President of the Tennessee Association of School Supervision and Administration, implemented professional learning communities, expanded community partnerships, and changed the district focus to a focus that seeks to meet the needs of the whole child—realizing that if the physical and social/emotional/psychological needs of individual children are not met, attempts to meet the cognitive needs will prove futile. 

A life-long member of the Bethel United Methodist Church, Linda teaches Sunday School and is organist there. She has two children; her daughter, Cherry, is a second grade teacher at Scales Elementary School, and her son, Brian, is the Associate Pastor for First United Methodist Church in DeKalb, Illinois. She has three grandchildren who are absolutely perfect in every way.