Director’s Achievement Award

Preksha Jagtap, Pratham Sharma, Ashish Anand and Michael McFarland, are recipients of the Director’s Achievement Award and are being recognized for their outstanding contributions to the development of the Lastinger Center for Learning’s Data Lagoon Web Portal. This team designed and implemented a streamlined, secure, and user-friendly process for researchers and other external partners to request, gain approval for, and access data within the system. Their work has significantly enhanced the Center’s ability to manage data access responsibly, ensuring both security and transparency. The process has been successfully adopted, and the team has demonstrated responsiveness to feedback, providing clear updates throughout the development process. Their efforts have laid a strong foundation for future research collaboration and data stewardship at the Center.

Christine Salama and Rocco Sementelli are also recipients of the Director’s Achievement Award and are being recognized for their excellent work to develop and set into motion next level project management tools and supports for the Center’s Research Catalyst projects this year. Together Rocco and Christine have designed and implemented an internal stakeholder engagement process to identify the most salient of milestones to guarantee success within each of the four Research Catalyst awards and brought the visibility of those milestones to life within a dashboard that includes project health status updates, risk documentation and elevation action, and overall project activities that will support affiliate faculty in delivery of their research products. This process improvement sets into motion a blueprint for future research project management that elevates the Center’s operational sophistication.

Chris Engledowl is receiving the Director’s Achievement Award for his contributions to advancing the Lastinger Center for Learning’s mission in the math education sphere. Establishing new math data pipelines  and leading the charge on assessment and attrition metrics, Chris has significantly supported our organizational OKRs. His collaboration with folks across the Center (including the New Worlds Reading team) on data dashboards, Data Sharing Agreements (DSAs), and impactful reporting exemplifies the Center’s commitment to data-informed decision-making and cross-functional teamwork. 

Also receiving the Director’s Achievement Award, in partnership with the Children’s Trust of Alachua County, are members of our literacy and research teams who completed a rigorous literacy needs assessment that provides a data-informed, community-centered analysis of literacy challenges and opportunities across Alachua County. With quantitative data from standardized assessments, attendance records, and survey responses; qualitative insights from focus groups, interviews, and community engagements; and a review of evidence-based and research-supported practices, they were able to present a holistic picture of literacy development early childhood to adulthood. At the end of the project, the team offered recommendations for addressing literacy needs in Alachua County.

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 Miles, 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.

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.

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.

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.