Breaker Society

Steve King resides in Albany, NY where he work in public relations for the Capital Region BOCES Communications Services team. He studied communications at The College of Saint Rose. He recently launched A Podcast for Creatives, an audio experience for creatives and thinkers in all fields with his co-host Michelle Hickey. Through this podcast, listeners find ideas to help up their game and share experiences with a community of creatives who understand what it’s like to work and create in a digital world.

Steve has always passionate about storytelling, and he has established himself as an innovative and recognized transformational leader in the area of social media and digital communications among public education PR professionals across the country.

I’ve known Steve since he attended a workshop I was conducting at the National School Public Relations Association National Seminar in Baltimore in 2014 so it was fitting we recorded this conversation in the midst of the 2018 NSPRA National Seminar in Anaheim, California in the hotel lobby. We talk about his new podcast, what inspires him, and have an honest conversation about topics relating to the area of education, social media, and much more.

Away from the office, Steve enjoys finding new (and old) coffee shops with his wife, Rachel, and enjoying a hot brew. He’s a mildly-obsessive Yankees, Cowboys and Knicks fan and there’s a good chance he’s currently thinking about a Seinfeld episode or playing some Billy Joel.

Carla Pereira leads a staff of more than 50 at the Peel School Board, which serves an incredible 154,000+ student body in 257 school buildings in Ontario, Canada. She ascended to the role of Director of Communications & Community Relations in 2017 after working at Peel for more than a decade. She has had the opportunity to work closely with the senior leadership team and the board of trustees, and she has provided timely responses and strategic counsel on issues ranging from straightforward to sensitive and complex, with high legal implications. She’s contributed and led award-winning campaigns and projects, shined a light on major topics and issues of our time, and she is well-respected in the profession leading workshops and trainings on topics like social media, equity and digital citizenship.

Prior to her work in school PR, Carla led major accounts for a PR firm in Toronto.These clients included pharmaceutical companies and major brands. She helped lead national media relations campaigns with great success, but the idea of working to help students drew her into working with Peel School Board.

If you’ve seen Scandal, think of Carla as an Olivia Pope-type. She handles media and never shies away from what might be considered a “controversial” issue. We talk about some of those issues in this conversation. The role of the school communications officer is vital, yet often misunderstood role, but it is one in which Carla has thrived. She has faced down many voices of opposition and people who have just been flat-out insensitive and on the wrong side of history, in my opinion, and she’s given voice to the many diverse pockets of students that have needed an advocate to lift them up.

Kim Wilson figured out that education was her career pathway when a high school business teacher took an interest in her future. While journalism piqued her interest at one time, once she figured out she wanted to be a teacher, the rest was history. She would spend a 36 year career in education as a teacher, principal and superintendent. She taught business and then took some time out of the education industry to work in the private sector as an editor for a publisher, but it was always education drawing her back. The last 14 years of her career she led two Ohio career and technical school districts (Ohio Hi-Point Career Center and Tolles Career & Technical Center), where I was fortunate enough to work with her in both districts. She was always committed and focused on doing what was in the best interest of students and this led to an increase in enrollment at both the districts in which she served as superintendent. This is important in career-technical education because students have to choose to attend and specialize in a career program, oftentimes shunning a stigma associated with vocational education. At the end of the day, though, Kim led two of these districts to enrollment increases and impacted the lives of thousands of more students than those schools were reaching before. But sometimes doing the right thing gets met with resistance and we talk a little about that in this conversation. We also talk about what she’s doing now that she is recently retired, what it was like to be a female leader in a male-dominated educational leadership system, and much more.

Eric Leslie is the founder and president of OnScene Productions in Columbus, Ohio, a company he founded out of a series of unfortunate events that began with 2008’s Great Recession. The company, though, which today serves dozens of clients in producing video content, was not originally making money through video work. They were designing websites for clients, something Eric was not classically trained to do, but something that he felt was necessary to pay the bills at the time. This, did not make him happy.  By not being afraid of changing the direction of his young business, Eric set himself up for growth by challenging the traditional, big production agencies. The opportunity to disrupt the video production industry was primed with the rise of digital and the democratization of platforms like Vimeo and YouTube and social media. So, OnScene, like so many startups, rose as a company out of the ashes of a shift in how we consume and do business. OnScene is a boutique video content agency, with capabilities in digital and commercial productions. In this episode, Eric and I talk about entrepreneurship and risk-taking and how having a purpose gives him the drive to do work and life on his terms. We talk about the work he has done, how he is redefining the video content industry, and much more.