Katie Boody is an urban educator. But like many in her position, she was frustrated with the way the public school system operates.
“There’s been a lot of turmoil with the public school system here since I moved back to Kansas City,” she told SPN.
In fact, in the last 40 years, Kansas City Public Schools has had 27 superintendents. The schools were under-performing across the board and then in 2012, lost their accreditation.
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“It was just frustrating that overall we weren’t gaining momentum or energy around urban education to perform or change the same way we were as a city around entrepreneurship or the arts community,” Boody said.
So she and a group of other educators decided it was time to make a change. 
The fruit of their efforts blossomed this summer with the first class of The Lean Lab, an incubator that brings together educators and entrepreneurs alike to create innovative educational solutions for all students. The program is based out of the Sprint Accelerator space in the Crossroads, and began earlier this week.
“We started looking at what was going wrong in KC and gained a lot of inspiration from the entrepreneurial community,” Boody (left) said. “We were fascinated with this idea of the accelerator or incubator, and decided to take lean startup techniques and apply them to the education world.”
The inaugural incubator fellowship has four lead Innovation Fellows, who will each pursue an individual project in the area of education innovation. Additionally there are five Brain Trust Fellows, individuals “who will be critical to the development and viability of the initiatives” of the Innovation Fellows, according to The Lean Lab’s website. Two “innovators in residence” also are part of the program to help support the initiatives.
Boody shared a little bit about each of the Innovation Fellows and what they’ll be working on over the next three weeks:
- Aditya Voleti: “A lot of kids, particularly refugees in the U.S., wouldn’t be placed in the correct level (of school) or in a timely manner. Aditya is working on an assessment data system to correctly place kids much more quickly.”
- Lynessa Cook: “Originally Lynessa was working on a collaborative platform for students and teachers, but very recently transitioned to a new project because she realized kids don’t have a safe place to go to after school in KC.”
- Beth Sarver: “Beth is working on trauma sensitive school initiatives. She learned about 90 percent of urban KC students have experienced an average of two traumatic events in their lifetime. She’s developing a way to train teachers to respond to kids in urban settings who have experienced such trauma.”
- Cecilia Belser-Patton: “Cecilia is finding a solution to empower young pre-adolescent and adolescent women of color because there are no real programs like that in KC to support women of color.”
The four-week program will culminate in a pitch day for city and KCPS officials, charter school leaders and members of the philanthropic community on July 11. Those interested in attending can RSVP online for the free event.
Credits: Katie Boody photo from LinkedIn.
