Brandy Samuell  M. Ed. is a dedicated educator with over 32 years of experience. She has been involved in all facets of public education from classroom teacher to assistant superintendent. Brandy’s knowledge base spans general education, special education, mental health support, and school turnaround. She has experience working in charter, rural, suburban, urban, and virtual school settings. Brandy currently serves as the Director of Mental Health and Related Services at eLuma.

Brandy earned a Bachelor of Business Administration, Marketing, degree from Texas Tech University in 1989, and a Master of Education, School Counseling, degree from Texas Christian University in 2002. She has completed Post-Master’s work in Educational Diagnostics and Educational Leadership from the University of the Southwest. In addition, Brandy is certified in Critical Incident Stress Management; she has managed multiple school-related crises as well as provided crisis management and crisis response training for school staff and community-based first responders.

While Brandy has a broad scope of knowledge and interests, the majority of her career has been dedicated to supporting the emotional and behavioral needs of students as well as managing, coaching, and developing staff.

Dr. Alexander Kurz serves as an Associate Research Professor at Arizona State University's Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College and as a Senior Fellow at the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE). In the past decade, he has secured over $50 million in federal funding from agencies such as IES, OSEP, USAID, and NSF to advance outcomes for diverse learners through research on instructional coaching, educational technology, and opportunity-to-learn for students with disabilities. A former special education teacher and behavior analyst, Dr. Kurz co-developed the Data-Driven Instructional Coaching Model (DDICM), recognized for improving teacher practice and student outcomes, and ReadyCoach, a technology platform that enables coaches to translate student data into targeted interventions within Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS). He has led numerous researcher-practitioner partnership (RPP) projects nationally and internationally, collaborating with experts and practitioners to operationalize instructional effectiveness in complex educational systems. His research informs the practice of thousands of educators across the United States.