Dallas National Family Engagement Fellowship

Yesenia believes families and schools working together can impact a child’s life. Yesenia is the Director of Family Community Engagement in Early Learning where she oversees the Pre-K registration and enrollment for Dallas Independent School District, community awareness on the importance of Pre-K, staff training, and collaboration with community partners to support a continuum of care for families. In addition, she collaborates with principals, executive directors, and community liaisons to help build relationships to assist with increasing family engagement at the campus.

Prior to this role, she served as a campus principal for six years. She utilized her role as a campus principal to share and execute the vision of becoming a community school involving students, teachers, parents, and community partners. As a director, she has been able to work with schools such as Maya Angelo where pregnant students attend school from 6th grade to 12th grade. She has created partnerships that will help support students to be educated on how to become a parent, improve parenting skills, and provide additional access to social services.

In addition, she is working with Stand for Children to educate teachers on how to implement relationship-building home visits and the impact it has in the classroom and with families.

Stacey has spent her career leveraging the power of relationships to connect people with resources. As co-founder of REAL Schools Initiative (now REAL School Gardens), she trained teachers and students in Fort Worth food deserts to grow their own food while learning valuable science lesson in the process. A former teacher, Stacey eventually took on a full-time role with Stand for Children, a national education advocacy organization. In this position, she gained a better understanding of education policy and its impact on teachers. She soon realized that the educator voice was silenced. To change that, Stacey organized a fellowship of educators to identify their needs regarding education policy and practice. Based on overwhelming educator feedback, it was evident that the need for authentic parent engagement was paramount.

In her current role as the Dallas Executive Director of Stand for Children, Stacey launched the Home Visit Project in Dallas/Fort Worth schools, which trains and supports teachers and other school staff to conduct relationship-building home visits with the families of their students. Today, more than 1,000 teachers and staff participate in relationship-building home visits. The Home Visit Project is on track to reach 20,000 home visits in five years.

Connect with Stacey via LinkedIn.

Derek’s efforts from birth-to-second grade, working to ensure every kindergartner is ready for school and every second grader is reading on grade-level. Prior to this, Derek served as the deputy director of early childhood at the Louisiana Department of Education, where he led policy planning for funding, accountability, enrollment, workforce and governance of early childhood programs. Previously, Derek was the director of finance and operations for the Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts, where he increased funding for the school at a time of budget cuts to education statewide.

Derek’s career in education began as a high school math teacher. He earned a bachelor’s degree in molecular biology and a master’s degree in finance from Tulane University. He has also earned master’s degrees in educational leadership from Northwestern State University and the Broad Center for Urban Education.

Kim is a passionate leader with a real talent for bringing diverse stakeholders together to solve complex social problems. Kim currently serves as the Managing Director for Early Matters Dallas, where she convenes over 200 organizations in Dallas County to rally behind common goals and strategies to increase early childhood outcomes for children zero-to-eight in Dallas County.

Prior to joining Early Matters Dallas, Kim served as the Program Director for the Baltimore Campaign for Grade Level Reading where she led a strategy to increase the city’s third-grade reading scores by 100 percent by 2020. She also served in the public sector as Deputy Director of Baltimore’s Office of Policy and Communications and Special Projects. In that role, she worked under the guidance of Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake to lead the development of the City’s Read to Succeed Plus program.

Kim is a Daily Record 2014 Leading Women Honoree and served as a part-time faculty member for Johns Hopkins Center for Leadership in Education, where she taught Principles of Marketing.

Connect with Kim via LinkedIn.

As an early childhood advocate, Kriston has devoted her professional career to high quality education for children of all ages. Family engagement is deeply woven into her personal philosophy of the development of a child. Kriston believes that true, intentional family engagement happens at the intersection of respect and understanding and that families are the most influencing factor in a child’s life.

Currently, Kriston is the Director of the Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters (HIPPY) Program at Dallas Independent School District (Dallas ISD) where she oversees the implementation of a Home Visiting Program that works with families who have children ages 2-5. In addition to working for Dallas ISD, Kriston is an Adjunct Professor at Eastfield College in the Child Development Department of the Social Sciences Division.

Connect with Kriston via LinkedIn.