Mary Kay Babyak is The Consortium for Public Education’s Executive Director. Appointed in 2016, she previously served as Senior Director of Programs & Organization, a capacity in which she led several of The Consortium’s key initiatives in addition to helping plan and implement overall organizational strategy. Most recently, Ms. Babyak has spearheaded a pilot initiative designed to bring business and community support to school districts seeking to improve career education and ensure their students are career ready when they graduate. She also has overseen The Consortium’s Forum for Collaborative Leadership & Innovation, which brings together teams of educators from districts working to create cultures of excellence in their schools. As part of the Forum’s focus on personalization, Ms. Babyak led the Consortium’s MAPS (My Action Plan for Success) initiative, which was designed to help schools give all students a process and the adult support they need to develop viable plans for post-secondary education and careers. Prior to joining The Consortium as Director of Initiatives in 2007, she was co-director of the APEX Consortium, which was based at Duquesne University and provided professional development for K-12 educators. For 12 years before founding APEX, Ms. Babyak worked with the Council for Basic Education in Washington, D.C., directing the national program of Fellowships for Independent Study in the Humanities.

TCFPE served as Anchor for Remake Learning Days in the Mon Valley. It has been a longtime partner with Remake Learning through its career exploration program for high school students, The Future Is Mine (TFIM) and its involvement in Hear Me!, which it helped roll out in public schools. This involvement helped make “Student Voice” a sustained emphasis in many of our partnering districts. More recently, TCFPE has been actively engaged in the Digital Badging initiative, rolling it out Wilkinsburg School District, where we operate one of our three, innovative after school and/or summer school programs in collaboration with community partners–ranging from SLB Radio Productions and Assemble Pittsburgh to Sense of Place Learning, Art Expression, Inc. and Carnegie Science Center. All of our collaborators and our programs, whether part of the network bearing the name, are deeply engaged in activities to Remake Learning across our region.