Jeremy leads KickUp’s team, bringing a passion for ensuring that classroom educators have a voice in their professional learning to form partnerships that make this vision a reality. Jeremy has worked in district and charter settings, teaching high school Algebra and Spanish in the Arkansas Delta and in Washington, D.C.
Jeremy is an alumnus of the Coro Fellows Program in Public Affairs, where he gained his initial interest in and passion for public education. Jeremy has been featured in educational publications from The Huffington Post to podcasts on leadership in K-12 education. Jeremy is a magna cum laude graduate of Washington University in St. Louis and a proud Philadelphian.
Vicky is an educator, entrepreneur, mom and proud Philadelphian. As KickUp’s COO, she acts as a professional Swiss Army knife (her unofficial title), ensuring that the team is equipped to deliver on its shared mission. She has spent the last decade scaling the KickUp team, building Client Success, and overseeing finance, revenue and people operations.
Vicky is passionate about educational equity, having served as a Teach For America Corps Member, a teacher in the School District of Philadelphia, and a board member at literacy-focused non-profit Heathy Newsworks. She learned to love Ed Tech at Waypoint Outcomes (acquired by Bridgepoint Education), where she worked to bring elearning solutions to market.
Vicky is a graduate and a fan of the University of Michigan and of UPenn’s Graduate School of Education.
Ana leads our Client Success team, who is responsible for ensuring that our school district partners get the most out of KickUp’s products. She’s worked in roles as high school classroom teacher, instructional coach, and principal in California’s largest urban school districts and spent the last 12 years leading the College Board’s Customer Experience team and leadership professional development for their Pre-AP instructional programs. Ana is passionate about supporting districts in fostering inclusive, affirming, and challenging learning experiences for every child. She has degrees in history and Spanish from the University of Virginia, Educational Administration from California State University, Dominguez Hills, and Ed.D. candidacy (ABD) at San Diego State University. Ana has finally achieved a healthy work-life balance and thoroughly enjoys exercising, cooking, traveling, and spending time with two adorable grand babies.
Chris leads the marketing, brand building, and demand generation efforts for KickUp. Prior to joining KickUp, Chris has spent the past 20 years leading the marketing function for various educational technology companies including Ellevation, Vocabulary.com, Amplify, and Kaplan/SCORE! Learning. Chris started his career with Saatchi & Saatchi advertising before moving to the client side with PepsiCo. His first start-up where he led marketing was Jamba Juice. Chris holds a B.A. in Political Science and Organizational Behavior from Brown University.
Jimmy is responsible for setting the product vision and guiding the technical strategy to get there. His number one focus is building a product that delights our users while supporting their most critical workflows. Coming from a background of software engineering, he keeps an ear to the ground to keep us apprised of current trends and best-practices in the tech industry. Prior to KickUp, Jimmy led web projects for Philadelphia-area schools, foundations, and nonprofits at P’unk Avenue. Jimmy graduated with high distinction from the University of Virginia with a B.A. in Music and Computer Science.
Maria Victoria Ferrara leads Product at KickUp. With over a decade of experience in product and business strategy, MV was most recently at TeachersPayTeachers (TPT), where she led the company's marketplace product group and developed mission-driven products to empower educators. Prior to TPT, MV was an investor at GSV Ventures, where she worked closely with education technology startups, providing strategic guidance and support. She began her career at Bain & Company in New York, advising clients on growth strategy, operational improvement, and organizational design. MV holds two engineering degrees from Stanford University, which underpin her systems-thinking approach and user-centric focus. At KickUp, she is committed to driving platform innovation and advancing the professional growth of educators.
Anna Jackson's 33 years of experience in public education have equipped her with real world insight to empower her role as a KickUp Product Advisor. Anna served as a classroom teacher, school counselor, and coordinator of behavior programs. Her most recent role as Executive Director of Leadership and Professional Development in Lubbock Independent School District gave her first-hand experience with various KickUp features. Lubbock ISD utilized KickUp for coaching logs, student surveys, professional development surveys, and evaluation management. Now retired, Anna is utilizing her practical experience to guide future development of the product. Her primary desire is to meet the ever-changing needs of districts and support the work of helping educators meet their professional goals.
For the past seven years, Dan Katzir served as the CEO of Alliance College-Ready Public Schools, a public charter school system that serves 13,000 low-income students and nearly 20,000 alumni across 26 high-performing middle and high schools in Los Angeles.
Before joining Alliance, Katzir was an education advisor to CEOs and boards of directors in school districts, charter networks, state departments of education, and education for-profit and nonprofit organizations. Katzir was the founding managing director at the Eli & Edythe Broad Foundation, where he served for eleven years and where designed and implemented four national flagship initiatives — the Broad Prize for Urban Education, the Broad Institute for School Boards, the Broad Superintendents Academy, and the Broad Residency in Urban Education.
Katzir also served as the regional director for Sylvan Learning Systems in Los Angeles, the executive director for UCLA School Management Program, and chief operating officer for Teach for America. He began his career as a consultant for Bain & Company, an international management consulting firm in Boston and London.
Katzir has served on many education boards, including The Broad Center for the Management of School Systems, the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Public Policy at Dartmouth College, Caliber Public Schools, Progressus Therapy, the Milton Hershey School and the Hershey Trust Company.
Katzir earned his MBA from Harvard Business School and his bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College. He lectures at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and is a volunteer leader at Dartmouth and Harvard. He is the co-editor of “The Redesign of Urban School Systems: Case Studies in District Governance,” published by Harvard Education Press.
Christy Hanson is a 35+ veteran of both public and private schools in Texas. As a former teacher, counselor, principal and district administrator, Christy brings a strong commitment to providing high quality instruction for every child. Dr. Hanson retired from Tyler ISD as an Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum and Instruction. She holds an Ed.D. in Educational Leadership from the University of Phoenix, a M.S. in Counseling from Texas Women’s University, and a B.S. in Elementary Education from University of North Texas. Dr. Hanson was part of the KickUp implementation team for Tyler ISD.
Dr. Michele Bowers proudly launched Vital Educational Leadership Consulting (ELC) in July, 2022 to train, coach, and support educational leaders, teachers, and support staff. She has been a school educator for close to 30 years and has the distinction of being the first woman and the first African American to be appointed as Superintendent of Lancaster School District in Lancaster, CA where she successfully served for 10 years.
Dr. Bowers is an experienced adjunct professor for CSUB in their Administrative Credentialing Program and an active member of numerous professional and community organizations. She is the President for California Association of African American Superintendents and Administrators (CAAASA) and Chairperson for the National Coalition on Educational Equity (NCOEE).
Dr. Bowers maintains an uncompromising commitment to equity in education and is deservedly a celebrated educator, trainer, and public speaker receiving numerous awards and recognitions.
Joellen Killion is a senior advisor to Learning Forward and served for many years as the association’s deputy executive director. As senior advisor, she leads initiatives related to the link between professional development and student learning. She led the most recent revision of the Standards for Professional Learning, and has extensive experience in planning, design, implementation, and evaluation of professional learning at the school, system, and state/provincial levels. She works with coaches, principals, district and state leaders to support understanding and embedding standards-based professional learning in a system. The author or co-author of numerous books, her most recent book, published in 2015, is The Feedback Process: Transforming Feedback for Professional Learning. Her other books include Coaching Matters (with Cindy Harrison, Chris Bryan, and Heather Clifton); Assessing Impact: Evaluating Staff Development; Taking the Lead: New Roles for Teachers and School-Based Coaches (with Cindy Harrison); Becoming a Learning School (with Patricia Roy), and others.
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