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We’re recording from the NCASA conference in North Carolina, and we sit down with Taylor Simmons, Director of Creative Design at Achievable Dream Urban Learning Leadership Center (AADULLC). If you’ve ever wondered what real school improvement looks like when it’s tailored to a district’s actual needs, this conversation gets specific fast. Taylor breaks down how AADULLC operates as an education consulting partner, building customizable K-12 learning solutions that go beyond one-size-fits-all programs.

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We’re recording from the NCASA Conference in Wellington, North Carolina, and we sit down with Ashley, a fifth grade teacher from Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools who’s stepping into a new season of education leadership. After 14 years in the classroom, she’s now a principal fellow through North Carolina Central, preparing for an administrator internship next year. That transition brings a big question: how do you move from being responsible for one room of learners to leading adults, systems, and school-wide success?

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Leadership doesn’t start the day you get the title. It starts in the rooms where you admit what you still need to learn, then go get it. From the NCASA conference in Wilmington, North Carolina, I sit down with Tyneka and Toni, two Wake County Public Schools educators preparing for the next step as principal fellows connected to North Carolina Central University through CCP3 and their MSA pathway.

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A surprise meetup at NCASA turns into a deep dive on what values based leadership looks like when you actually practice it every day. We sit down with Gina Watts, VP of U.S. Student Transformation at Growing Leaders, and Molly from the student transformation team, to talk about the Maxwell Leadership principles behind their work and why those principles still matter in real schools with real constraints.

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A paid principal residency sounds almost too good to be true, but North Carolina is doing it and doing it with real rigor. From the floor of the NCASA Conference in Wellington, we sit down with Lauren, director of the North Carolina Principal Fellows Program, to unpack how the state is strengthening school leadership by investing in a clear pathway from educator to administrator.

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A conference hallway can be louder than a classroom, but it can also reveal what great school leadership sounds like. From the NCASA conference in Wilmington, North Carolina, we sit down with Saida, principal of East Lawn Elementary, to talk about what actually holds a school together when the job gets hard and the needs keep coming.

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A student prevents a fight before it starts, and a principal turns it into a moment the whole class will remember. That’s the kind of fast, specific recognition that can shift school culture, and it’s the heart of our conversation from the NCASA conference in Wilmington, North Carolina with Dean Cook, Sales Manager at Presentation Solutions. 

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Educational leadership can feel like a mystery from the outside, so we wanted to make it concrete. We talk with Jessica, a vice president in a statewide education technology organization, about what her role looks like day to day, what she’s learning on the board, and how she’ll step into the president role next. Along the way, we get into why consistent communication like newsletters matters for keeping schools informed about edtech trends and what’s changing across a state.

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You can feel it in the hallway conversations at KAST: schools are not asking whether technology belongs in the classroom anymore. The real question is how to make it matter. From Louisville, Kentucky, I sit down with digital learning coaches Erica and Sandy to unpack what it takes to support teachers when devices, apps, and expectations keep changing. 

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A school device rollout can look perfect on paper and still fail in the real world if support is slow, warranties are short, and deployment is a slog. That’s why we sat down with Garrett, an account manager at Byte Speed, to talk about what actually makes K-12 IT feel smooth for districts, teachers, and students. Byte Speed has been working with Kentucky schools for decades, and Garrett shares what they listen for when they meet districts at conferences: the everyday pain points behind “we need computing solutions.” 

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