Leadership Team

Folio Collaborative was founded by a team of educators committed to the mission of developing the best possible system for enhancing faculty and staff growth and learning in schools. Our leadership team is ready to work with you to implement a comprehensive plan designed to meet your unique needs.

Meredith Monk Ford
Executive Director

Meredith Monk Ford

Meredith is the Executive Director of Folio Collaborative and guides the organization’s support for its 150+ member schools.

Meredith was an independent school classroom teacher and coach, first at the Bryn Mawr School (her alma mater) and then at McDonogh School, both in Baltimore. At McDonogh, Meredith was also a grade level administrator and chaired a task force to enhance professional growth opportunities for faculty. When McDonogh received a grant from the E.E. Ford Foundation to develop a professional growth and learning process that additional schools could use, Folio Collaborative was created and Meredith transitioned to become Executive Director.

Meredith’s passion for school leadership and managing the process of change in educational institutions shows through her Folio management. She visits and meets virtually with Folio members around the country to lead seminars, train administrators and teachers, and facilitate conversations around professional growth, leadership and feedback.

Meredith received her BA from the University of Maryland and a master’s degree in Liberal Arts from the Johns Hopkins University. She earned a second master’s degree in School Leadership at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Contact Meredith:
mford@foliocollaborative.org

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Melissa Fast
Senior School Success Program Manager

Melissa

Melissa is the Senior School Success Program Manager at Folio Collaborative. She will lead the Folio team that provides all of your implementation and school success support. She has more than 20 years of experience in education. During that two-decade career, she has served as an adjunct college instructor, classroom teacher of mathematics, state coordinator of mathematics, and worked in higher education administration.
She entered into the edtech space at DreamBox Learning as a Senior Customer Success Manager where she combined her passion for learning and school success to support districts. Prior to this role she was the Mathematics Consultant at the Kansas State Department of Education for nearly a decade.

She has led professional learning opportunities for educators on a variety of topics such as: administrator and peer observations, creating a growth mindset school culture, and establishing SMART goals to drive educator and student success. In addition to her work with educators, she has provided professional learning to parents, local school boards, business and industry representatives, and legislators.

Melissa has a Bachelor of Science from Bethel College, 7-12 Professional Teaching License of Mathematics for Washburn University, and a Masters of Science from the University of Kansas.
Contact Melissa: mfast@foliocollaborative.org

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Sean Flaherty
Director of Technology and Software Evolution

Sean

Sean leads the process of developing and enhancing myFolio, from initial design and speciﬁcation development to ﬁnal testing and deployment. He is the “go-to” person for myFolio users – consistently providing introduction, training and assistance about myFolio functionality. Through this, he identifies the additional features that members need and then guides their implementation.

Sean has more than 25 years of experience in all facets of the software development lifecycle across a broad range of environments. Well-versed in open-source web technologies, he most recently worked in the Ruby programming language and the Ruby on Rails framework.

Sean holds a Bachelor of Science from the George Washington University School of Business.
Contact Sean: sflaherty@foliocollaborative.org<

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Liz Kornheiser
Vice President of Strategy>

Liz

Liz is Folio’s Vice President of Strategy and leads Folio’s E.E. Ford Foundation work and manages the day-to-day operations at the Collaborative. As the daughter of a boarding school headmaster, she is no stranger to education. Liz is an Emmy Award-winning producer of ESPN’s highest rated daily sports show, Pardon the Interruption. She left the world of television production in 2012 to pursue her passion for education and public sector work.

Prior to joining Folio, Liz served as the Partner and Director of Consulting Services at Greenwich Leadership Partners. There, she consulted and coached school leaders and executives around strategic planning and organizational design, facilitation, and professional development. She also designed and delivered GLP’s Strategic Planning Institute, an innovative program helping schools to create and implement strategic plans for driving institutional growth and developing high functioning leadership teams.

She initially joined Folio in 2018 as the project manager for the E.E. Ford Leadership Grant. In that role, she supported the design team of administrators and teachers from Folio member schools as they researched best practices around collaboration, prototyped updates for the myFolio platform, and developed the release of new features.

Liz graduated Phi Beta Kappa and received her BA in Cultural Anthropology from Duke University, and an MEd from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Contact Liz: liz@foliocollaborative.org

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Derick Pagán
School Success Manager

Derick

I bring with me a decade of experience within the sphere of education, both at the K-12 level and in higher education; primarily working with teacher preparation programs to assist individuals entering the teaching profession. I started my professional career as an 8th grade ELA teacher at Great Oaks Charter School in New Jersey. After my time at Great Oaks, I joined the central office team at Success Academy, New York City’s largest charter school network, providing guidance and support to their incoming student teachers across over fifty individual schools as a member of their Master’s and Certification Team. Following my time with Success Academy, I continued training educators as a part of the Student Advisement team at Relay Graduate School of Education. While at Relay, I advised student teachers from serving may different school populations, including NYC DOE, charter networks, and a number of independent schools.

Aside from my direct experience partnering with K-12 teachers, I have also held positions working with Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging initiatives and programming at Harvard University, working with various colleges and universities to nurture and advise their faculty members using data analytics, and serving as an Academic Advisor and freshmen course instructor for students at New York University’s Meyers College of Nursing. Most recently, I worked at Panorama Education, an edtech company that partners with school districts, independent schools, and charter school networks to collect and utilize SEL data from students, teachers, and various community members to improve student outcomes and provide more holistic support for students, school staff, and community members.

I hold a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Connecticut and an M.Ed. in Higher Education from Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Contact Derick:
dpagan@foliocollaborative.org

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Alaena Silva
Business Development Representative

Alaena

Before joining Folio as Business Development Representative in 2023, Alaena was a sales consultant for West Music. There, she partnered with schools throughout the US to ensure each had the right materials to best support their teachers and students.

Alaena is a veteran teacher with 18 years experience in the music classroom. During her time in education, she mentored and coached teachers of all levels of experience and presented professional development workshops at the state and local level. She continues to serve on the executive board of her chapter of a national nonprofit dedicated to providing high-quality professional development for music educators.

Alaena earned her Master of Music and Orff Schulwerk certification at West Chester University and Bachelor of Science in Music Education at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

Contact Alaena: asilva@foliocollaborative.org

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Jess Wilson
Vice President of Operations

Jess

Jess is the Vice President of Operations for the Folio team working to translate our strategic vision into a reality by providing support to the team across all areas of work. She started her career as a high school social studies teacher in a district outside of Philadelphia where she taught Economics, World History, and American Government. She went on to get her Master of Public Policy from the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan.

Upon completing her Master’s Degree, she moved to Maryland to work for the Maryland State Department of Budget and Management as a budget analyst. Her work in the capital budgeting office led her to take an interest in the facilities campaign to rebuild or replace all the school facilities in Baltimore. She joined the Maryland ACLU education team as an advocate and worked tirelessly to win over $1 billion in funding with the passage of the 21st Century buildings legislation to support rebuilding or replacing over 25 schools with the greatest facility needs in Baltimore.

After passing the legislation to fund the efforts, she joined the Baltimore City Schools team working on executing the construction campaign. After the completion of the first two schools of the program, she transitioned to work as the Director of Strategy and Compliance for the Academics office, leading budget development, assessment strategy, and union negotiations for the Academics team.

As Maryland reviewed the state education funding formula with the establishment of the Kirwan commission, she was responsible for reviewing and modeling the recommendations from the commission to identify the impacts of different scenarios for the students of Baltimore. She finished her time at City Schools working in the Finance Office as the Executive Director of Strategic Resourcing and Financial Management where she led the procurement team and the budget process for the entire district throughout the COVID-19 pandemic response.

Contact Jess: jwilson@foliocollaborative.org

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