Directory

Dr. Heinze is an educational psychologist and Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. His research investigates how schools influence disparities in violence and other risk outcomes from an ecological perspective that includes individual, interpersonal, and contextual influences on development. He is particularly interested in structural features of school context and policy that perpetuate inequity in violence and firearm outcomes, but also how these institutions can serve as a setting for intervention.

Dr. Hsieh is an Assistant Research Scientist​ in the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. Dr. Hsieh is PI on an NIJ funded evaluation of Sandy Hook Promise Anonymous Reporting System and Co-I on several school safety projects the project director for the University of Michigan Flint Adolescent Study, a 20-year longitudinal study of youth growing up in Flint, MI. Her research focuses on adolescent resilience, youth violence, and violence victimization, and has expertise in longitudinal and cross-domain data analysis.

Prior positions include: senior associate at the Children’s Defense Fund, researcher, UNC Child Health Outcomes Project, the first public health initiative to track key indicators and monitor morbidity/mortality for childhood diseases; director, Head Start Resource Access Project, coordinating health training for 178 grantees across six states; MCH clinical director, Virgin Islands Department of Health; and mainstreaming coordinator, Baltimore City Public Schools. Her most recent publication, Happy, Healthy and Ready to Learn!; Insure All Children was launched by then Dept. of Ed Secretary, John King and DHHS Secretary, Sylvia Burwell. Other recent publications include: Feeding Hungry Minds: Stories from the Field; A Shared Vision to Change the Course of Childhood Obesity in African-American and Latino Communities; and Insure Our Children, Ensure Our Future.

Ms. Adams-Taylor holds degrees from Howard University, The Catholic University of America, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and had fellowships with the Shriver National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development and Walter Reed Army Medical Center. She is married and has two children — Aja and Ife — who make all things possible.

Ron Avi Astor serves as the subject matter expert consultant for the Deterrent Measures subject core. Dr. Astor holds the Marjory Crump Chair Professorship in Social Welfare at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, with a joint appointment in the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. His work examines the role of the physical, social-organizational, and cultural contexts in schools related to different kinds of school violence. His studies have included tens of thousands of students, teachers, parents and administrators, and findings from these studies have been published in more than 150 scholarly manuscripts. His most recent books all published by Oxford University Press include 1. Bullying, school violence, and climate in evolving contexts: Culture, organization and time. 2. Mapping and monitoring bullying and violence: Building a safe school climate and 3. Welcoming practices: Creating schools that support students and families in transition. Currently, Astor is creating an international model for sustainable and scalable infrastructures that support safe and welcoming schools. Astor has won numerous national research awards from the Society for Social Work and Research, American Psychological Association (APA), and the American Educational Research Association (AERA). He holds an honorary doctorate from Hebrew Union College, is a fellow of the APA, AERA, and SSWR and is an elected member of both the National Academy of Education and the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare.

Danny Carlson serves as NAESP’s Associate Executive Director, Policy & Advocacy. Prior to joining NAESP, Danny was a policy analyst for the National Governor’s Association Center for Best Practices. In that role, he oversaw the Education Division’s K-12 human capital work, advancing policies to address principal challenges across the country. Danny previously served as an education advisor to a United States Senator and was responsible for advancing her K-12 education agenda. In that capacity, he crafted policy provisions included in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) to improve principal and teacher recruitment and retention, address chronic absenteeism, and boost opportunities for STEM education.

Dr. Cornell serves as the subject expert for Threat Assessment. Dr. Cornell draws upon 20 years of experience with development, research, practice, and training in school-based threat assessment and more than 35 years of experience evaluating and working with violent offenders. He developed the only model of school threat assessment subject to controlled studies, authored a detailed manual for school-based teams, and has conducted hundreds of threat assessment workshops across the U.S. He has extensive experience with consulting and training school-based teams as well as creating a train-the-trainer program that prepares trainers to provide high-quality training. He has worked extensively with state and school district partners in Virginia as well as California, Florida, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas, among others.

Kayla Jackson is a Project Director at AASA. She is currently working on a number of projects including a Department of Labor funded apprenticeship initiative and a New York Life Foundation funded childhood bereavement project. She joined the Children’s Program team in June 2011 to serve as the Project Director for the CDC-funded coordinated school health project, Strengthening School Administrator Support for Coordinated School Health. Prior to joining AASA, Jackson was the Vice President of Programs at the National Network for Youth where she had responsibility for all programmatic activities at NN4Y; two federal cooperative agreements; and the annual national membership conference. She has extensive background in women’s and adolescent health, particularly the health needs of women of color, youth, and youth at high risk for negative health outcomes related to reproductive health, breast cancer, mental health, and sexually transmitted infections/HIV. Jackson had an article published in the February 2019 issue of School Administrator titled “Unpacking an Invisible Burden: Children’s Mental Health”. Jackson received her BA in English from Mount Holyoke College and an MPA from NYU.

Dr. Jennifer L. Maeng is a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education and Human Development and a former high school science teacher. Her scholarship addresses the role contextual factors of the educational setting, such as school climate and safety, play in supporting effective teaching and learning and understanding professional development that facilitates teachers’ implementation of research-based STEM instruction. She has been a principal investigator or in a substantive senior research role on more than 10 grant-funded projects from agencies including the U.S. Department of Education, Virginia Department of Education, National Institute of Justice, and National Science Foundation.

Dr. Melde serves as a subject expert in the Law Enforcement and Coordination subject core. For the past 15 years, Dr. Melde has worked with schools and prevention program providers in the areas of training, implementation fidelity, and curriculum review. He has worked on the national process and outcome evaluation of the National Crime Prevention Council’s Teens, Crime, and the Community: Community Works program, served on the curriculum review and redevelopment committee for the Community Works program, the national process and outcome evaluation of the Gang Resistance Education and Training program, as well as the ongoing process and outcome randomized controlled trial of an innovative whole-school change program throughout Genesee County, Michigan. This ongoing randomized controlled trial integrates three evidence-based practices – restorative justice, youth mental health first aid training, and crime reduction through environmental design – to improve school climate and reduce the use of exclusionary practices in schools. Dr. Melde has published extensively in the areas of youth violence and perceptions of crime and victimization risk.

Kenji Okuma is the Crisis Center director for Sandy Hook Promise’s national Say Something Anonymous Reporting System. In this leadership role, he combines practical experiences from more than two decades in law enforcement with expertise in high-level, complex operations management and solution-oriented community relations to create safer schools and save lives.
Kenji believes in the power of information-sharing as absolutely critical in violence prevention, having personally seen and investigated countless acts of violence and suicide – and talking to survivors about what happened and the warning signs that preceded the tragedies. These experiences now drive his commitment to strengthening relationships between educators, mental health practitioners, and law enforcement to protect school communities nationwide.

During his tenure with the Nevada Department of Public Safety’s Investigation Division, Kenji (Detective Sergeant Ret.) worked with the Nevada Department of Education in the development and launch of the state-mandated, SafeVoice program for all public, charter, and private K-12 schools. Kenji designed and launched Nevada’s first-ever crisis center, specifically dedicated to receiving anonymous tips from students across the state.

Kenji has extensive training and experience in criminal procedures, threat assessment, homeland security, information privacy and security, as well as budget and grant management, policy and protocol administration, and was heavily engaged in the Nevada legislative process. Kenji also served as Executive Officer for the Nevada Threat Analysis Center, serving as the state liaison between the education community and local, state, and federal law enforcement partners, and as the Nevada state liaison to INTERPOL.

Kenji is a sought-after expert in the philosophy, design, and implementation of anonymous reporting systems. He lives in Nevada with his wife, Buffy, and his two dogs, Kato and Liv, where they raised their six adult children. Kenji regularly commutes to the Say Something Anonymous Reporting System Crisis Center in Miami, FL and Sandy Hook Promise headquarters in Newtown, CT.

Anathea Simpkins is Sandy Hook Promise’s deputy national director of the Say Something Anonymous Reporting System (SS-ARS).

Anathea brings 25 years of education, publishing, and product management to her leadership position. Before joining Sandy Hook Promise (SHP), she worked as a classroom teacher, managed curriculum development at Pearson Education, and served as product director of educational programs for Sylvan Learning for 10 years. At SHP, she manages the SS-ARS team and program operations – including the only 24/7/365 Crisis Center dedicated to school-based anonymous reporting nationwide – as well as the account management of more than 100 districts across the U.S. Anathea’s expertise in education and educational policy coupled with her experience managing educational-technology projects and products make her uniquely qualified for this position. Anathea telecommutes to the Sandy Hook Promise headquarters in Newtown, CT and Crisis Center in Miami, FL, and lives in Brooklyn, NY, with her son Huxley.