Dr. Kelli Peterson is deeply invested in high-quality schools, having served as a teacher and school administrator across various cities including Brooklyn, Cleveland, Atlanta, and Nashville. Additionally, Dr. Peterson has served as a local system leader and state system leader as the Assistant Superintendent for the Louisiana Department of Education.
As a local system leader, she had the responsibility of overseeing charter school accountability, building the capacity of charter boards, development of new school strategy and the execution of the charter authorization process.
As a state system leader, she revised the state charter application to include intentional questions shifting to a community centered authorization approach, allocated $2M towards the development of New School Choice Pandemic Response Funds, developed an organizational structure to meet the needs of schools statewide in order to provide technical assistance and support to special education educators, allocated $1.2M of competitive funds to school systems to help support the cost of providing compensatory services to students with disabilities, collaborated with Louisiana State University to provide Social Emotional Learning and Academic Integration Professional Development for schools with an out of school suspension rate of double the national average for three consecutive years, and allocated $1M of the Governors Emergency Education Relief Fund to create a partnership with Ochsner Health to launch a virtual therapy program to provide access to free mental health virtual visits for all public K-12 educators.