Meet the Founder
I've spent more than 20 years working at every level of early childhood education — as a classroom teacher, a Head of Faculty, a national curriculum lead, an international development consultant, and now a state quality assurance specialist. That range wasn't planned as a career strategy. It came from following the same question into every new role: what actually makes an early learning system work, not just on paper, but in practice?
That question took me from a pre-K classroom in Washington, D.C., to leading early childhood curriculum development for the UAE Ministry of Education, to designing a national school readiness assessment system with the World Bank in Liberia. It's also what I bring to my current work inside a U.S. state quality-rating system — the same systems-level thinking, applied to the policies and processes that shape what happens in classrooms every day.
I've spent more than 20 years working at every level of early childhood education — as a classroom teacher, a Head of Faculty, a national curriculum lead, an international development consultant, and now a state quality assurance specialist. That range wasn't planned as a career strategy. It came from following the same question into every new role: what actually makes an early learning system work, not just on paper, but in practice?
That question took me from a pre-K classroom in Washington, D.C., to leading early childhood curriculum development for the UAE Ministry of Education, to designing a national school readiness assessment system with the World Bank in Liberia. It's also what I bring to my current work inside a U.S. state quality-rating system — the same systems-level thinking, applied to the policies and processes that shape what happens in classrooms every day.
I hold a Master's in Teaching with a focus on Early Childhood Education, along with certifications from Harvard University in the Science of Early Learning and Leading Adults for Quality Improvement. I'm a Certified CLASS™ Observer for both PreK and Toddler classrooms — work I still do today, because staying close to the classroom keeps policy and systems work honest.
I've also built things from nothing when nothing existed to build from: a national early learning framework where none existed, a readiness assessment system for a country establishing one for the first time, and internal tools and processes that took teams from manual, error-prone tracking to systems that run themselves. That instinct — to build the missing infrastructure rather than work around it — is the throughline across everything I've done.
I started Early Ed Essentials because I kept seeing the same gap, in every setting: agencies and organizations doing important work, slowed down by systems that were never designed to support it. Compliance gets attention. The underlying structure — the policies, tools, and processes that determine whether compliance is even achievable — often doesn't. That's the work I want to do: not telling a program what standard to meet, but helping the people responsible for the whole system build one that actually holds up.
I hold a Master's in Teaching with a focus on Early Childhood Education, along with certifications from Harvard University in the Science of Early Learning and Leading Adults for Quality Improvement. I'm a Certified CLASS™ Observer for both PreK and Toddler classrooms — work I still do today, because staying close to the classroom keeps policy and systems work honest.
I've also built things from nothing when nothing existed to build from: a national early learning framework where none existed, a readiness assessment system for a country establishing one for the first time, and internal tools and processes that took teams from manual, error-prone tracking to systems that run themselves. That instinct — to build the missing infrastructure rather than work around it — is the throughline across everything I've done.
I started Early Ed Essentials because I kept seeing the same gap, in every setting: agencies and organizations doing important work, slowed down by systems that were never designed to support it. Compliance gets attention. The underlying structure — the policies, tools, and processes that determine whether compliance is even achievable — often doesn't. That's the work I want to do: not telling a program what standard to meet, but helping the people responsible for the whole system build one that actually holds up.