Co-Founder and Executive Director
Lauren is a researcher, consultant, and advocate for children. She has spent the last 20 years striving to identify strategies to create and sustain high quality public schools for all students. As the founder and president of LMR Consulting, Lauren’s practice specialized in pressing education reform issues pertaining to school restructuring and turnaround, charter schools, special education, and state and district support for school improvement. A significant portion of her work has been devoted to studying and providing technical assistance focused on supporting students with disabilities’ access to and success in charter schools. She recently co-authored and piloted rubrics for charter school authorizers to assess applicants’ and operators’ capacity to educate students with disabilities for the National Charter School Resource Center. As a consultant to the University of Virginia Partnership for Leaders in Education, Lauren has provided strategic program development, lead research inquiries, and conducted site visits to school districts across the country engaged in bold turnaround efforts. She is also a strategic partner and member of the leadership team of the National Center on School Turnaround based at Wested. Recent projects include examining the role of school boards in school transformation efforts and co-editing a book for state education agencies regarding leveraging their role to drive, enable, and support successful turnaround efforts in high-poverty districts. Before founding LMR Consulting, Lauren was a Senior Consultant at Public Impact where she conducted her own work and led project teams to produce research, evaluation, and technical assistance, and provide direct support to clients. Prior to becoming a consultant, Lauren was a faculty Research Associate at the College of Education at the University of Maryland, College Park where she conducted both research and external consulting and evaluations. While at UMD, Lauren directed Project Intersect, a four year, federally funded study of special education in charter schools and was a consultant to three other federally-funded initiatives examining issues involved with educating students with disabilities in the charter sector: Project SEARCH, SPETACS, and the TA Customizer. These projects produced a variety of reports and tools that charter authorizers, charter schools, and charter support organizations across the national have used to build their capacity related to educating students with disabilities. Lauren has published extensively on the topic of delivery of special education and related services in charter schools. Examples of publications include four chapters in Special Education Challenges and Opportunities in the Charter School Sector and a report regarding Demystifying Special Education in Virtual Charter Schools. She has written and co-authored state- and school-level case studies of emerging and promising practices associated with educating students with disabilities in charter schools. Lauren is committed to community service on the local level and serves on her traditional public school board and is chairwoman of the Ledyard Charter School, a small alternative high school in Lebanon, New Hampshire. A graduate of the University of Vermont, Lauren holds a Masters in Higher Education Administration from The George Washington University and a Ph.D. in Education Policy and Leadership from the University of Maryland, College Park.