MIGUEL SOLIS
AWARD RECEIPIENT
Miguel Solis currently serves as Managing Director of Strategic Initiatives for the Commit Partnership. Since 2009, he has served the residents of Dallas in the areas of education, housing, and transportation. Miguel began his professional career as a member of President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign and soon after, was selected as a Teach For America corps member in Dallas, TX where he taught 8th grade social studies in the Dallas public schools. Solis would later serve as special assistant to the superintendent of the school system; co-found the non-profit Latino Center for Leadership Development; and run the urban policy think tank Coalition for a New Dallas. In 2013, Miguel was elected to the Dallas ISD Board of Trustees at the age of 27. During his tenure he was also elected as the Board President and Vice-President, making him the youngest person to ever hold these roles.
As a Dallas ISD Trustee, Miguel’s efforts included drafting and unanimously passing the district’s first early childhood education policy; a ban on out-of-school suspensions for the district’s youngest children which is now state law; a comprehensive racial equity policy leading to the creation of a multi-million dollar racial equity department; and helping to create the district’s revolutionary teacher excellence evaluation, support, and pay system, among other initiatives.
Solis’ most recent efforts have involved helping create a predictive analytics prototype to recruit teacher candidates with high potential for success and the community resource index, a resource data set that identified historically underinvested communities and injected $41 million into school bond projects to help alleviate effects of this disinvestment. During his decade of service to the district, Dallas ISD underwent a monumental transformation which saw the number of its improvement required schools reduced from 43 to 3, two multi-billion-dollar school bonds passed including the largest in the history of Texas, and its innovative concepts used as models for other districts across Texas and the nation.
Miguel is involved in numerous non-profit activities including serving on the Children’s Medical Center Foundation board, the FUSE Corps national board of directors, and the Teach For America national board of directors. He is also an alumnus of the Aspen Institute’s Rodel Fellowship, having been selected as an elected official who has demonstrated an outstanding ability to work responsibly across partisan divisions and bring greater civility to public discourse. For the totality of his work, Miguel was selected to the Dallas Business Journal’s 40 under 40 and the 2021 Dallas 500 Most Powerful Business Leaders.
Miguel graduated from Lamar University with a Bachelor of Arts in History and Harvard University with a Master of Education in Policy and Management. He and his wife Dr. Jacqueline Nortman are also proud parents of Olivia Solis, a pediatric heart transplant survivor and the strongest person they know.