“I ended up accidentally empowering people who were already empowered,” she said.

So, 12 days after leaving office last year, she returned to the boardroom to announce the creation of the Coalition of The Silence — a group dedicated to organizing and amplifying the voices of black kids, Latino kids, poor kids and kids with disabilities.

“Too often, in the four years I served on the School Board as its only African American member, decisions were made that impacted these students without input from their communities,” Hone told her former colleagues last month. “The silence will be silent no more.”

Hone, 49, said she recognizes herself in the kids she aims to help. She grew up with her mother on the south side of Chicago. She saw her father, a Yugoslavian immigrant, on weekends. His side of the family pitied her as a poor black kid, the product of unwed parents.

“Everyone in his family described me as a tragedy,” Hone said. “They dismissed me.”

But she excelled in school, eventually graduating from law school at the University of California at Berkeley. She ran for the School Board in 2007 to help other kids write similar success stories — and to make sure no one forgot the needs of poor and minority families, even if those families didn’t attend meetings.

Several of her former board colleagues say she succeeded. She was a passionate and sometimes tearful advocate on issues ranging from summer school cuts to admissions policies at the prestigious Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, where black and Latino students account for less than 4 percent of students.

But she took a central role in other fights, too, and expressed outrage so often that some board members sometimes seemed to tune her out, said Michael Hairston, president of the Fairfax Education Association. He said Hone might be more effective now, with a tightly focused mission and an army of parents behind her.

“She has clout in the community,” he said. “That may help the cause.”

The nascent Coalition of The Silence has attracted special-education advocates, members of the NAACP, Urban League and the school system’s Minority Student Achievement Oversight Committee. It also includes parents who have never been politically active in the school system but see the coalition as an opportunity to speak out.

Among them was Rhonda Mustafaa, a mother of three who moved to Fairfax last year. She said it took six months and a “lot of sweat and tears” to persuade school officials to allow her sons to enroll in gifted and talented classes, despite documentation from their previous school.