Kristy Keane is a sub-separate special education teacher at BLOCKS preschool in Framingham. Kristy has been working in special education for 15 years and has been in Framingham for one and a half years. She is passionate about meeting the needs of every student and making sure our most at-risk students receive the best education possible. In her personal time, Kristy enjoys spending time with her cat and family as well as reading and attending book conventions.

Linda Vaden-Goad, Ph.D. served for 9 years (2010-2019) as the provost and vice president for academic affairs at Framingham State University in MA. Her primary goals were to bring together and feed the strengths of the university and surrounding community such that the students, faculty, staff and broad community were successful in new ways that made a palpable positive and measurable difference. During those years, together they employed grassroots methods to create two successful outcomes-focused five-year strategic plans with solid metrics and outcomes. Through this process, there was significant growth in the number of full-time faculty including those from underrepresented groups, discipline-based honor societies, industry advisory boards, community-collaborative centers, honors students, student-faculty collaborations, students studying abroad, global partnerships, internships, grants received, degrees conferred, retention rates and graduation rates. A key result was a renewed focus on first-year student success and a review of policies, procedures, and practices (the “Three Ps”) that hinder student success. As a consequence of this focus, the university changed 20 policies and 20 more procedures and practices through shared governance that inspired greater first-year student success, thereby realizing the highest retention and graduation rates experienced at the university since these two measures were first recorded 21 years earlier. Prior to joining Framingham State, Dr. Vaden-Goad served as the Dean of the School of Arts & Sciences at Western Connecticut State University (2002-2010), leading successful bridge programs in college readiness, and augmenting student/faculty collaborative research, new discipline-specific undergraduate research journals, and fundraising efforts to support academic programs. Prior to her work in Connecticut, she served as a social psychology professor and later department chair at the University of Houston-Downtown (1990-2002). She also served as president of the Texas Conference of the American Association of University Professors. She holds a Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University of Houston. A recent publication is below: *Vaden-Goad, L. (2023). “Chapter 2: Reimagining university policies: Becoming a student-first campus,” in Jo Arney, Timothy Dale, Glenn Davis, and Jillian Kinzie, Radical Reimagining for Student Success in Higher Education, First Published by Stylus Publishing: Sterling, VA., Published in 2023 by Routledge, New York, NY.