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.

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

Bryn Humphrey and Amanda Wilson led an incredible team effort to develop and implement the Literacy Micro-Credentials. In less than six months, they supported the program launch to over 6,000 participants. Within the first six months of the program, 1,156 instructional personnel successfully earned mastery. Participants saw an average 71% pretest/posttest knowledge gain and gave the micro-credentials a Net Promoter Score of 80. In addition to modeling leadership with this center-wide project, Bryn and Amanda also represented the Lastinger Center to the Florida Department of Education.

Lucianna Grasso, Tammy Perez, Deza Free, Dulcy Dillinger, and Emily Moya led the configuration of the Flamingo student information system, Genius, to prepare it for enrollment of new learners and transcript and certificate access for historic learners. They’ve collaborated with technology and data teams to accommodate the needs of 55,000 learners and made sure it is ready for scale in the future so the Center can increase its impact and students and educators.

Bryan Lutz, Luiz Franco Giovanini, and Gabe Lipartito contributed to the extraordinary ongoing work to make sense of the New Worlds Reading Initiative data. Their efforts support our ability to verify eligibility and track outcomes of the growing program, which reached over 120,000 K-5 public school students in Florida during its first year of implementation. 

In the 2021-2022 fiscal year, Brittany Gonzalez and Erica Lopez instituted policies and procedures to support a consistent employee experience during recruitment, hiring, onboarding and retention. Their efforts supported 30 new hires, 9 promotions and 18 part-time positions – for a total of 57 hires. Their contributions have had a significant impact on the Center’s 96% full-time employee retention rate.

Amanda Pate and Stephanie Snidarich led an extraordinary group of Literacy Matrix Navigators during the 2021-2022 academic year. They met regularly with the Navigators to ensure that over 1,300 teachers had the support they needed to complete the Literacy Matrix with mastery and receive their State of Florida Reading Endorsement. 

The Massachusetts Flamingo Early Learning implementation team, including Ron Viafore, Theresa Loch, and Karen Osarenkhoe, received the Q3 Director’s Achievement Award for improving Massachusetts Early Childcare Leaders’ facilitation skills.

Mary Bratsch-Hines and Donny Schrum pulled, cleaned, and processed data across multiple sources and systems to support OKR data. Their efforts helped the Center get closer to our goal of having access to regular data about our impact, scale, and sustainability to inform our decisions.

Nadeige King contributed to notable work in improving the efficiency of our payroll distribution system. The projected 20% drop in the amount of payroll we charge to our operating budget is estimated to save the Center $100K in the 2022-2023 fiscal year, which can now be redistributed to support the Center’s growth efforts in other productive ways.