Meet the DLC Team
Brooke Allen
Founding Executive Director
Jess Post
INTERIM EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
Jessica Post is a former school and district administrator with 15 years of experience across K-12 education, program management, and nonprofit leadership. Jess grew up in Knoxville and graduated from the University of Tennessee, beginning her career on the ground in Tennessee’s charter school community, where she worked across grassroots advocacy, student enrollment, and school operations. Her path has since taken her across the country, leading in roles such as Chief Strategy Officer at Yakima School District and founding Chief of Staff at LearnerStudio, a future-of-education-focused nonprofit venture studio.
Over the last five years, Jess has partnered with mission-driven leaders at pivotal moments through her consulting practice, stepping into critical leadership gaps, launching new programs, and guiding teams through strategic change. She holds an MBA from Texas A&M Corpus Christi and lives outside Austin, Texas, with her husband, three children, two dogs, and eight chickens.
Laura Bantle
LEARNING COMMUNITIES MANAGER
As a project manager, Laura works with DLC partners nationwide to support system-level special education program development, implementation, and evaluation. She strives to dismantle the structural and belief-based silos often built around diverse learners and educators. Prior to her work at DLC, Laura was a founding team member of a charter high school in Nashville, TN, also serving on the school’s leadership team as an assistant principal and supporting a team of special educators, EL teachers, interventionists, and counselors. She earned her M.Ed. in high-incidence special education from Vanderbilt University while supporting school-based math intervention research and supervising pre-service teachers.
Mary Matthews Coffey
PARTNERSHIPS Director
Lily Doyle
OPERATIONS MANAGER
Madison DeVincenzo
PROGRAM SPECIALIST
Justine Katzenbach
DIRECTOR, ORGANIZATIONAL STRATEGY
Maddy Galdámez
PROGRAM SPECIALIST
Maddy brings to the DLC deep experience as a special educator, classroom teacher, reading specialist, and instructional coach, starting in St. Louis Public Schools before expanding into work with multilingual learners and students with disabilities. She most recently served as Instructional Faculty with Teach St. Louis, coaching teacher residents and designing graduate coursework in literacy. Maddy earned her bachelor’s degrees from Northwest Missouri State University and her master’s from the University of Missouri-St. Louis. She is a certified Reading Specialist and is pursuing an Ed.D. at Vanderbilt.
Mary Rakes
FELLOWSHIP MANAGER
Serena Sayles
Project MANAGER
Serena Sayles is a Project Manager with the Diverse Learners Cooperative, where she manages our grant-funded efforts to strengthen systems that support teachers of students with diverse learning needs. She brings several years of leadership experience in the charter school sector, where she worked to design and implement initiatives that improve instructional quality, educator support, and student outcomes.
Serena’s work centers on systems thinking, facilitation, and program leadership. She enjoys helping teams make sense of complex challenges, translating research and best practices into practical strategies, and guiding collaborative problem-solving with educators and school leaders. Known for her thoughtful facilitation style, Serena is passionate about creating spaces where educators can reflect, learn together, and build sustainable practices that support both teachers and students. A legacy Nashvillian, Serena is excited to work alongside schools and partner organizations who are deeply committed to strengthening teacher retention and expanding opportunities for all learners.
Erica Stenstrom
PROGRAM SPECIALIST
Chloe Walters, Ed.D.
PROGRAM SPECIALIST, MULTILINGUAL LEARNERS
Our Founding Story
A note from DLC's Founder, Brooke Allen
I found this creative work rewarding, but also challenging. I was the only or one of a few special educators in my school. Opportunities for professional development often included sitting in the back of a core content session because there wasn’t an option specific to diverse learner needs. Coaching meetings felt disconnected from my daily practice, and evaluation rubrics were difficult to use. Time for collaboration with my peers was hard to come by, and school systems designed to build community were sometimes less than inclusive of my students.
Out of these findings came an idea for an organization that filled this gap – an organization that would connect special and EL educators with relevant resources, high quality professional learning opportunities, and networks of their peers. If teachers felt equipped and empowered, would they stay longer and inspire better outcomes for students with all abilities and language backgrounds? The Diverse Learners Cooperative launched in 2018 to find out.
Board of Directors
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