Promoting Your Voice on School Safety

Dr. Lori Brown is an experienced teacher, school administrator, and grant/RFP writer who has designed professional learning for schools around the globe. Following 15 years in the public schools of North and South Carolina, she worked for the world’s largest education company (Pearson) designing school transformation plans, leadership initiatives, and personalized offerings for classroom-based teachers. She has worked in the for- and non-profit sector designing and implementing educator focused professional learning plans. Her publications include a peer reviewed journal article, a book chapter on the theme of violent student writing, and frequent educational articles in various publications. Gretchen Oltman is a lawyer, author, and educator. She currently works as an associate professor of organizational leadership at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. Her career spans over two decades in education, from serving as a high school English teacher to leading in an administrative capacity at the university level. Her first book, Violence in Student Writing: A School Administrator's Guide won the National Association of Secondary School Principals’ High School Level Dissertation of the Year award in 2009. Her work focusing on violence in student writing informed the National Council of Teachers of English’s position statement “Beliefs about the Students’ Right to Write.” She is also the coauthor of Law Meets Literature: A Novel Approach for the English Classroom, The Themes that Bind Us: Simplifying the Teaching of US Supreme Court Cases in the Social Studies classroom, and Prepare to Chair: Leading the Thesis and Dissertation Process and most recently the ASCD publication What’s Your Leadership Story? A School Leader’s Guide to Aligning Who You Are With How You Lead.