A naturally rebellious child, union president and arts education supervisor Dr. Pam Farrell remembers ending up in the principal’s office often. Nowadays, we would say Pam was “inquisitive.”
Little did she realize that this streak would serve her well as a union leader decades later.
Born in Brooklyn and raised in Pompton Plains, N.J., Pam Uhre and her four siblings grew up in what she calls a traditional Catholic family and attended Catholic school for 12 years. Two of the five children also attended Catholic colleges. Pam went to Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, Virginia.
Pam loved art, but when she suggested attending the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York or an art college in California, her mother said there was no career in it and put her foot down. So off she went to Mary Baldwin. She majored in education merely as a backup.
“I remember our third-grade teacher telling us there were only three things a woman could be, a nurse, a teacher or an airline stewardess,” she says. “So I picked stewardess, even though I never did it.”
After graduating from college, she stayed far away from teaching and went to work managing restaurants in Alexandria, Virginia, while doing display windows on the side.
She created windows for Macy’s and other stores. She used to say, “I’m Rhoda!” referring to the adventurous character Rhoda from The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
Happy though she was, she sought a change nine years later and earned her Master of Arts degree in art education from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her first teaching job with Arlington Public Schools was two days a week, allowing her to keep “doing windows on the side.”
Next, she taught visual arts full time from pre-K through fifth grade and stayed for six years. She says, “Arlington is unusually arts-oriented, very supportive. The approach is interdisciplinary.”
The work was intensely demanding, with no downtime. As many as 550 students came to her over the course of a week. Some of the work, such as ceramics, was physically demanding but worth it.
When she became the arts education specialist in the central office in 2000, she jumped at the opportunity and stayed in the job for eight years.
In 2008, she earned her second master’s degree from the University of Virginia in supervision and administration, and she was named arts education supervisor for Arlington Public Schools. The job combined so many things, including arts and leadership. For the past 19 years, she has hired and developed highly effective staff, provided professional development in arts education and helped build a strong sense of collegiality across the district. The program is nationally recognized for music and won the NAMM Award for music education.
In 2022, she earned her doctorate in educational policy and leadership from George Washington University.
She says, “It was always a personal goal, so I went for it.”
Mission-driven, Pam says, “A lot of children come to school because of the arts. A lot of them get out of bed because of the arts. During COVID and its aftermath, arts education helped students come through their isolation.”
She adds thoughtfully, “If a child can feel like a good artist, this can help them through their difficulty in other subjects. It gives them their self-worth.”
Through much of this, she was a member and vice president of the Arlington School Administrators Association. When it became a union in 2022 — today AFSA Local 151 — she remained vice president for a year, then became president.
“When the state of Virginia voted to allow collective bargaining back in the state,” Pam says, “we studied very hard to be a union. We studied other unions and contracts, and it was quite a learning curve.”
She says their first contract was less than stellar, but the next time, “we negotiated a damn good contract and people are appreciative. The more people who face adversity, the more they call us.”
They learned a great deal from AFSA after being invited to an event in Alexandria.
“As soon as we met the team, we knew we had found a home. They have been so instrumental as a resource and a feeling that we are not alone. As AFSA 151, we are part of a larger union family, and that means a lot when you are doing this work.”
“I liked the movie Norma Rae, but I didn’t grow up in a union family and didn’t know anything,” she says. She and the team had to learn from scratch.
“Unions are absolutely necessary,” she explains. “You have to have a voice and a process for challenging things that are not good for your school system and therefore not good for our students.”
As a union leader, she says she must be comfortable with conflict. She is comfortable having difficult conversations with school management.
“Otherwise,” she says, “I couldn’t do right by our members. Being sent to the principal’s office often in school prepared me well. I guess I should thank the nuns for great preparation to do union work.”
Pam muses about the many challenges facing AFSA members and all administrators. “Especially site-based administrators, that’s a demanding job. Additionally, the narrative being pushed that public education is not good is just wrong. We have a great public school system in Arlington, so we must continue to change the narrative.”
As a union president and full-time administrator, Pam works weekends and nights. Yet she manages to read a good deal. She also goes to museums with her husband, Bart Farrell, a restaurant consultant, and to the Kennedy Center. “Even after all that’s happened to it, it’s important to support the arts.”
She and Bart are foodies and eat out as often as they can. They are also inveterate travelers and are particularly fond of Italy — “The food, the people, the arts!”
They hope to retire in the Liguria region for part of the year.
