GRETCHEN CRITELLI

Virtual Campus

• Developed, implemented, and maintained leadership program aimed at orientation and transitional activities for new and 9th-grade students, with a special focus on promoting diversity and inclusion.
• Provided training and oversight to student leadership teams that focused on leadership development, planning, and executing district, school-wide, and community events that fostered positive student, parent, and community engagement.
• Championed Virtual Campus by public speaking at professional conferences, in school, and community meetings, thereby increasing the school's profile and recruitment numbers.
• Directed Virtual Campus club programs, including recruitment and sponsorship efforts, ensuring diverse and engaging student participation and sponsorship relationships.
• Provided technical assistance to students and families regarding policy and procedures of Virtual Campus.
• Wrote monthly reports and made recommendations to administrative leadership.

Central Campus

• Established and maintained strong relationships with the leaders of Iowa's Home Builders Association and other top skilled-trades business owners in the Des Moines metro.
• Coordinated communications between the skilled trades stakeholders and the director and administration of Central Academy and DMPS Operations.
• Co-founded the Skilled Trades Alliance and assisted in raising 2.3 million dollars for the Skilled Trades Academy.
• Collaborated with team to set direction, scope, goals, and timelines.

Hoover High School

• Established businesses and community agency partnerships that brought in youth programs that served academic, social-emotional, diversity, inclusion, and post- secondary needs.
• Fundraised thousands of dollars the basic needs of Hoover High School students and its feeder schools.
• Led a team of non-profit agencies in northwest Des Moines to work together effectively, achieving our common goals, minimizing repeated services, and improving support for the communities we shared.
• Created and still maintained a community database by gathering information from the non-profit agencies into a unified community database, which later evolved into the DMPS Online Family Resource Guide.
• Empowered English language learning community leaders to make recommendations to senior leadership at DMPS about how to enhance services for immigrant and refugee students and families.
• Directed the annual Hoover Global Gala to display international student talent and bring together the school, local businesses, and leaders.
• Partnered with the Department of Homeland Security to create workshops aimed at peacekeeping and addressing gang-related issues. Conducted monitoring and oversight of activities to ensure peace.

• Established partnerships and facilitated communications between Sesame Workshop and local Iowa schools and organizations.
• Provided oversight and performed interviews with elementary aged children.
• Recommendations made based on results for future television programming.

• Developed, implemented and moderated a cognitive-behavioral curriculum for YWRC's Youthful Offender Program that challenged criminal thinking, behavior, and addiction for female adjudicated youth referred from the Department of Corrections and greater Des Moines educational systems pursuant to diversion programs.
• Taught effective communication, empathy, neutrality, and problem-solving skills to facilitate change, understanding, and resolution.
• Routinely spoke at the Iowa Women’s Correctional Facility to groups of incarcerated women on how to use principles of behavior analysis to engineer their internal and external environments so as to promote healthy and crime-free lifestyles.
• As part of the Iowa Legislature’s “Lunch and Learns” series, presented on the cultural norms and practices of adjudicated youth in the Iowa juvenile court system. (March 2010)

• Composed detailed research reports analyzing public opinion research for esteemed clients including Better Homes & Gardens Magazine and Traditional Home Magazine.
• Meticulously interpreted and condensed the collected data, subsequently generating comprehensive reports.
• Assisted with focus and product research groups for the Meredith Corporation, its subsidiaries, and clients such as the Des Moines Area Education Association.