Dr. Gary Bradt, an international speaker and author of The Ring in the Rubble: Dig Your Way Through Change and Find Your Next Golden Opportunity, will open NSPRA’s 2010 Seminar in Charlotte with a compelling keynote on this topic designed to help us embrace the change we are all experiencing in our world today. This engaging and inspirational presentation will provide you with 10 tools for finding opportunity in every change. Dr. Bradt will share inspiring stories and examples of how other leaders have used these tools to turn change and tough times into amazing opportunities. You’ll learn that leadership is an honor and a responsibility to be assumed by each and every member of an organization and you will be inspired to take practical steps to better yourself, your district, and all those you have the opportunity to serve and influence. Learn to exchange stress for success and return to your school district eager for the next challenge!

Jamie Vollmer is a national expert in developing critical community conversations about key school issues. In his keynote, Schools Cannot Do It Alone: The Unprecedented Importance of School Leaders in the Effort to Increase Student Success, Jamie will combine equal parts praise and call to action to offer his vision of the unique and powerful role school communication professionals can and must play in building a conversation between America’s schools and the American public. Using statistics, facts, and humor, Jamie will explain how the contract between schools and communities has evolved from the reasonable (Teach our kids), to the overwhelming (Raise our kids). He will share his Prerequisites of Student Success: COMMUNITY UNDERSTANDING of the challenges educators face; COMMUNITY TRUST in our desire and ability to reach the goal; COMMUNITY PERMISSION to change a selecting system that may have been practical but was never moral, and is now neither; and COMMUNITY SUPPORT throughout the critical, albeit, difficult process. Jamie’s passion and commitment will reenergize and motivate you to reach out an engage your community on a whole new level.