Sessions
Session 2- Breakout 2
1:00 PM - 2:15 PM Sat
Meet Lori Bitar and Academic Advocates: Your Trusted Education Partners!
Academic Advocates was born as a result of our award-winning founder Lori Bitar’s relentless quest to support students and families in ways that made sense and made a difference!
As a young teacher, Lori knew the value of relationships and the impact they had on student success in school. Her love of teaching and students drove her to craft lessons that were engaging and empowering and FUN! Her peers noticed her outstanding work with students and nominated her as the Teacher of the Year. As honored as she was, she saw clearly how the stifling bureaucracy of public school hindered her ability to help students in ways they needed.
She launched her first education enterprise, Tutors Unlimited, with immediate success. Parents were eager to have personalized, research-based tutoring for their children. The results were outstanding! Students were thriving and enjoying school again. As Tutors Unlimited grew, parents asked her to take things to a larger scale and start a charter school. As the founder of a new charter school, Touchdowns4Life, more families were experiencing the non-traditional teaching and learning that Lori and her team knew how to deliver. Not only were the students achieving significant gains, the school garnered a Governor’s TOP 100 Middle School award for achievement.
At that moment, Lori knew she had to take her work across the U.S. and support schools that were struggling to help students. As a nationwide educational consultant, Lori began to engage and empower the teachers who were in floundering classrooms. Unfortunately, the bureaucracy and subtle bigotry of diminished expectations blocked the way for her to assist the schools that needed it most.
Determined to get information into the hands of staff, students, and stakeholders who wanted help, she wrote and published her first resource book: SOS! Save Our Students. It is a compilation of stories where she serves as the SuperHERO with her sidekick students to fight the arch-enemies of education: Bureaucracy, Poverty, Gangs, and a myriad of issues that impact students all over the world.
Lori always knew she was born to help students unleash the superpowers they already had inside: the students were the true SuperHEROES and she was their sidekick.
Today she is on a quest to design, develop, and deliver MicroSchool pods to students in grades 6-12 who are tasked with the bewildering, inconsistent, and often overwhelming demands of remote learning and traditional school models.