But Booy insisted DeVos wants to create a system in which all families are empowered. “Monopolies don’t reform themselves,” he argued. His own schools are racially diverse and more than half of the students are low-income. Over the years, he said, DeVos and her husband have mentored students, inviting them over for Christmas parties and even helping parents and guardians find jobs or stable housing. Over Chinese checkers or other board games, DeVos would help students strategize about how to get to college, he said. Potter’s House was where she and her husband began to understand and appreciate the struggles some children face, Booy said. “I think that had a really big impact on them.”

Like DeVos, Booy grew up in the Grand Rapids area in the Christian Reformed faith, and attended Calvin College. He began his career teaching at a local public elementary school. “I did love teaching for the Grand Rapids Public Schools,” he said, but Potter’s House was an attempt to create a “family school,” to serve vulnerable kids who attended local schools that weren’t able to provide some of the wraparound services they needed to succeed academically. It was also, Booy said, an attempt to give families who hadn’t had the option before the ability to choose a private, religious education, a desire he shares with DeVos.

Booy, who adopted two sons from India, has been friends with the family for some 30 years, vacationing at their compound in Florida and attending get-togethers with the couple’s other long-time friends. (He insists that, even after three decades, he is one of their newer friends.) In addition to her affinity for walking (“She likes to stay fit,” he said), skiing, reading, and traveling, the woman he knows has a knack for consensus building. Booy served as the second elder at Mars Hill Church while DeVos served as the first elder. “She was able to lead the church through some really transitional times,” he said, adding that people couldn’t get away with not sharing their perspective while she was running a meeting, something he expects to carry over to the Education Department.

The primary responsibility of DeVos’s new job is to run a department charged with making sure that children from all backgrounds have access to quality education, a very different mandate from leading a church, foundation, or the Michigan GOP. And one teacher and fellow Calvin alum who has interacted with DeVos in several capacities said that he’s troubled by what he sees as her endorsement of policies that disadvantage large numbers of low-income children even as he appreciates that a good number of low-income Grand Rapids families feel they have benefited personally from her generosity. While a family with resources and time can take advantage of the option to choose a school, other families are left behind, particularly in places that don’t have a robust network of community organizations and private donors, he said, echoing an argument frequently put forth by teachers’ unions and backed up by research. He was also put off by an opinion piece DeVos penned in the mid-1990s, in which she suggested that she expected the politicians she donated to to advocate for her beliefs. “I joke that the trinity to them is God, country, and business, and I think that’s what troubles me,” he said.

Many of the people I spoke with for this story say they are equally troubled by her first month on the job. The week I was in Michigan, DeVos praised historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) for being “pioneers” of school choice before walking the comments back. (The schools were created specifically because black students did not have the choice to attend white colleges.) Before that, she drew the ire of already wary public-school teachers by saying that instructors at a school she’d just visited were “waiting to be told what they have to do.” During a painful confirmation hearing, DeVos seemed not to understand the basics of the debate about how student success should be measured, and she told the senator representing Sandy Hook that guns might be necessary in schools to protect against grizzly bears.