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Alumni in Action

“My Education Pioneers experience showed me that I had plenty of company in my newly chosen career path.”

Kaya Stone - 2005 Bay Area

Spotlight on Kaya Stone

During his fellowship, Kaya worked with Oakland Unified School District. As part of the District's redesign team, he developed best practices and capacity-building mechanisms for the accounts payable department, created a pricing model for selling district services to charter schools, and designed a year-long professional development plan for the fiscal team. Kaya is currently the Managing Director of Operations and Technology at KIPP NYC, overseeing technology, data, public funding, purchasing compliance, and legal and board relations for the KIPP charter schools in New York City. He is also an alumnus of the Broad Residency in Urban Education.  

My Education Pioneers experience showed me that I had plenty of company in my newly chosen career path.

I started out at Let's Go Travel Guides, where I was a writer, editor and ultimately publishing director. After that, I worked in business development for a travel website (www.smartertravel.com) and then did AmeriCorps VISTA at the I Have a Dream Foundation in a first year public school in San Francisco.

I loved the business development work I was doing, but at the end of the day I was sitting in a cubicle trying to figure out how to increase click-through rates for Expedia. I found myself looking forward to my time as a Big Brother and reading about issues in education in my spare time. I looked through job descriptions and found myself drawn to Director of Operations/COO type positions. Yet with no experience in education, I decided I would first try to dive in head first through AmeriCorps VISTA and then apply to business school.

I spent a majority of my summer fellowship in the basement of the OUSD Accounts Payable Office and honestly, I couldn't have asked for a better placement. I had little desire to have a career in a district office, but I knew whatver the nature of my work in education, I would be interacting with the district office in some capacity.

My experience gave me a wonderful inside look at the culture of districts, the challenges in bringing about change and the scale at which folks were working.

The main "aha" moment during my fellowship was the realization that there was an amazing community of collaborative, reform-minded education entrepreneurs out there sharing and learning from each other and incredibly dedicated to this common cause. I had known that there were individuals here and there doing very cool things.

My Education Pioneers experience showed me that I had plenty of company in my newly chosen career path.

And I keep in touch with my cohort mates! Recently I was able to convince Christine Vasconez to join our team at KIPP NYC to head up our data efforts. In addition, Diana Lee and I continue to learn from and with each other through the Broad Residency.

Every day, I get to see the results of our work at KIPP in the learning and joy that runs throughout the school. We have KIPP alumni who are returning to their community as KIPP teachers. We have over 80% of our alumni going on to college every year in neighborhoods where historically just 10% have college degrees. There's no shortage of work that needs to be done, but we do have wonderful examples of what's possible.

As a member of the team, I am continually inspired to do whatever it takes to do my part in providing our kids with the same opportunities that I had growing up and expect for my own children.