The Lastinger Center recognizes this quarter’s Director’s Achievement Award recipients for their outstanding contributions to the success of 2024’s All Associates Meeting in Jacksonville. Their dedication, creativity, and collaboration ensured an engaging and impactful event for all.

From designers and event planners to content developers, communication specialists, and the Learning Agenda Team, each of you played a pivotal role in bringing this gathering to life. Your hard work and commitment to excellence made this year’s AAM a resounding success:  Ryan J. Perez, Amanda Bloyen, Shalah Newsome, Brittany Gonzales, Laverne Daniels, Nan Hayes, Jamie Harmon, Nemir Matos-Cintron, Michelle McGriff, Spencer Still, Tiffany Taylor Jones, Jordan Koziol, Jamie Greenspan, and Raleigh Lutz.

Juliana Bunn has also received the Director’s Achievement Award for her pivotal role in building the OKR Data Book in Power BI. Her work has made our impact, scale, and sustainability OKRs more accessible and trackable via a dynamic report, allowing associates to view the Center’s progress towards it’s key objectives over time.

The eight Organizational Health and Structure Steering Committee members took on the responsibility of caring for and representing the perspectives of Lastinger Center associates broadly. With a remarkable level of care and comprehensiveness, they reviewed existing data from the Center the data gathered by Conversant. They also gathered new data through experiences, conversations, and surveys. They supported the overall review process and participated in joint sessions with the executive team to review findings as well as independent sessions to develop recommendations. Through the themes and recommendations shared, they facilitated associates’ voices being heard and influenced the decision-making process. They are to be commended for the way in which they exhibited the core values of the Lastinger Center and helped to inform the actions taken to improve Organizational Health and Structure moving forward. 

Stephanie Cugini takes initiative and sees projects through to completion. By establishing  a strong relationship between the Lastinger Center and the UF Foundation, initiating systematic processes for cultivating new sponsors, managing relationships with existing donors and promoting renewals, Stephanie has helped the Lastinger Center achieve 30% of our $25M capital campaign goal to date. Stephanie’s recent efforts contributed to a renewal of the James Patterson gift for literacy and to a Naples Education Foundation award for math.

Jessica Richards has created a systematic process for our client journey, established standard operating procedures for Lastinger Center literacy partnerships and initiated a conference strategy. These efforts to develop and maintain partnerships with school districts have led to approximately $2.5M in literacy contracts in the first half of this year. Jessica has out-performed established goals and has contributed to the generation of internal funding, allowing us to allocate resources for reinvestment in product development and enhancement

Matt Griffin, Deborah Habora, Jennifer Reed, and Diane Evans have demonstrated exceptional commitment and efficiency in handling a substantial volume of expenditures for the Lastinger Center. As part of the newly established Processing Team, they have created a higher level of personalized support to Lastinger Center staff, prepared the Center for the UF GO transition, and remained adaptable and agile. Over the past quarter, they have processed over 330 travel requests and reports, over 400 purchase orders and over 800 vouchers. Additionally, their efforts have led to a significant reduction in the reimbursement timeline for a vast majority of associates.

Pam Chalfant, Alex Prinstein, Maggie Gardner, Ana Valdez, Ana Pascual, Liza Leonard and Rachel Chastain-Gross lead the Lastinger Center’s coaching programs. Their work provides high-quality coaching professional learning to teachers, coaches and administrators, and supports even greater student learning outcomes. The team consistently delivers high quality professional learning experiences as evidenced by a perfect Net Promoter Score (100) from participants in coaching programs.

Tim Mosunich and Fernando Franco Crespo have provided leadership to enhance the Flamingo Learning user experience. They have implemented an approach to “Bug Bashing” that ensures that new coursework materials are free of bugs and glitches, and they support users throughout their coursework to improve retention and mastery. The results of their work are evidenced in top-of-class Net Promoter Scores, which ranged from 72 in literacy to 90 in early learning in Q2, all above industry standards.