[1] Covington earned her Ph.D. in 1993 at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, with a dissertation in topological group theory jointly supervised by Victor P. Schneider and Bradd Clark,[2] and in the same year joined the LSUS faculty.
[3][4] In the mid-1990s, she became one of the first cohort of fellows of Project NExT, a professional development program of the Mathematical Association of America, and she has continued to be associated with Project NExT as part of its leadership team since then.
[4] Beyond her work in teacher education at LSUS, she has also contributed to local mathematics education by founding the North Louisiana Math Teachers' Circle in 2010,[5][4] and she was elected as the governor of the Louisiana–Mississippi section of the Mathematical Association of America in 2016.
[3][4] In 2004 Covington was named LSUS Elmer and Barbara Simon Distinguished Teaching Professor.
[6][4] The Louisiana–Mississippi section of the Mathematical Association of America gave her their Distinguished Teaching Award in 2012.