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On a Thursday night in a California school district, a kindergarten teacher stepped to the microphone at a school board meeting and asked the seven people on the dais a question they hadn’t been asked before.
“How many of you like watching medical dramas from shows like ER or The Pit?”
A few hands went up. She continued.
“Consider a kindergarten classroom as being like an emergency room. I am the ER doctor and I have to triage. How fair is that to the student that is ready to read or that needs help, but I can’t give it to them because I have to deal with this kid who’s taking off, and I’ve got to call the office to get someone to go chase him because I can’t leave?”
The room got quiet. The teacher, Kristy, had spent twenty-four years in the classroom. It was one of three times she’d address the board that year. A few months later, her union asked her to run for president. She won.
Ask Kristy how she got there and she puts it plainly: “I’m not union savvy. I’m more human savvy.”
Human-savvy leaders are what schools need more of right now, and the fastest way to grow them is the pathway Kristy walked: inner work, structured through a serious professional development container, that turns a burned-out practitioner into a leader with an evidence base and a voice.
Before the microphone
In 2018, Kristy signed up for a Breathe for Change training in San Francisco. Sixteen years into teaching kindergarten, and in her own words, “too nervous to share my voice.” She thought of herself as “just a kindergarten teacher.” Union work wasn’t on her radar. Neither was a board-meeting microphone.
By every credible measure she was also an excellent classroom teacher. Her students loved her. Her colleagues respected her. But excellence inside a classroom rarely converts on its own into voice outside of it. Educators are trained to be givers. Advocating up the hierarchy is a different skill, and one that most teacher-preparation programs still don’t teach.
Emoji cards and a breathing ball
The change started small.
Kristy took what she’d learned in the training and dropped it into her classroom on Monday morning. Emoji cards. A two-word check-in. A breathing ball for transitions. A calm-down spot with a timer. A kindness ambassador job.
None of that looked like leadership development. It looked like a kindergarten routine. But something was building in the practitioner as much as in the students. She was training what the Human Intelligence framework calls the emotional layer (affective awareness, meaning-making) and the relational layer (empathy, repair, belonging), as a set of daily practices she embodied rather than a topic she studied.
Research on structured mindfulness training for leaders points to exactly this mechanism. Leaders in a 2019 qualitative study reported improved self-regulation, stronger relational quality with team members, and enhanced listening capacity as direct effects of contemplative training (Rupprecht et al., Frontiers in Psychology, 2019). It’s self-report and doesn’t establish causality, but it names the pathway credibly: what leaders practice inwardly shows up in how they relate outwardly.
For Kristy, that pathway ran through her classroom for seven years before it ever ran through a microphone.
Then came the master’s
In 2023, the William Jewell College Master’s of Science in Education (M.S.Ed.) in Transformative Teaching & Learning, in partnership with Breathe for Change, launched its first cohort. Kristy was in it. Fifty-seven years old, two years from retirement.
Her faculty advisor, Dr. Ilana Nankin, was the co-founder and co-CEO of Breathe for Change and Kristy’s original trainer. At their first advising meeting, Kristy arrived with what advisors of veteran teachers hear often: ambitious ideas about starting new programs, launching wellness initiatives for other people’s kids, running yoga classes for parents. Dr. Nankin sent her back to the classroom in front of her.
“You’re already doing the work. You’re teaching in this extraordinary way. Document that. Collect data on that. Analyze the data.”
Kristy’s capstone question became: How does a daily morning circle impact language acquisition and academic progress for English language learners in kindergarten?
She spent six months studying her own classroom. Kept a notebook in her pocket. Tracked academic benchmarks at the start of the year, in November, in February, and at year end. Nineteen of her twenty-five students had entered kindergarten with no English. By November, 80% had hit the beginning-of-year academic benchmark. By year end, 99% had improved. By the February benchmark, 95% had reached it.
Something shifted in her once the numbers were in. She’d moved from practitioner to researcher, and researchers speak differently.
The hardest part, Kristy will tell you, wasn’t the research. It was writing an academic paper after twenty-five years away from college. What made it possible was that the M.S.Ed. didn’t ask her to write in a voice that wasn’t hers. Her advisor’s own dissertation had been drafted in two days at the historical society at the University of Wisconsin, on the advice of Michael Fenchel, her co-founder, who’d told her to “write from your authentic voice.” Kristy heard the same instruction. She wrote it her way. It ran seventy-some pages.
Data as a way of speaking
The year after the capstone, Kristy walked in ready in a way she hadn’t been before. Her class of twenty-eight kindergarteners included three students diagnosed with autism, one more she suspected was on the spectrum, nine students with speech IEPs, and twelve students with no English on entry. She started the year in the same triage that had overwhelmed her early career. This time, though, she had data. She had language. She had an evidence base.
So she started writing emails. To her principal. To the special education department. To the assistant superintendent. To anyone who’d listen. When emails weren’t enough, she went to the school board and gave three separate speeches on three separate themes. The ER triage line landed in one of them.
RAND’s 2024 State of the American Teacher survey found that roughly twice as many teachers report frequent job-related stress compared to comparable working adults, and roughly three times as many report difficulty coping with it (Doan, Steiner & Pandey, RAND Corporation, 2024). Kristy fits inside that landscape. Most educators who fit inside it don’t walk toward a union presidency; they walk out the door. What separated her path was that the daily practice had built a voice over time, and the M.S.Ed. gave that voice the evidence base it needed.
The human-savvy job
When her union approached her to run for president, Kristy said no first. A week later, she said yes. She was elected by Monday. She hasn’t had a moment of doubt since.
She’s planning to run union meetings the way she runs her classroom. Every site rep meeting opens with a gratitude practice. She wants to be, in her words, “the kindness ambassador for the district.” A monthly yoga class in the gym is on the calendar. She’s thinking about how to bring a district that’s grown disjointed, split unevenly across east side and west side schools, back into shared purpose.
None of that is soft. Gratitude, in a district in crisis, is a strategic tool: it sets the emotional floor a meeting has to argue from. Kristy’s approach draws from the relational and universal layers of the Human Intelligence framework, and from the same pattern behind the educator who knows herself: inner work produces outer credibility. Leaders who’ve done that work move differently. They can hold a room without dominating it.
The pattern isn’t new. A Denver superintendent building coherence across a school district hit record graduation rates by treating the human infrastructure of the system as the leverage point. Kristy is trying the same move at the union level, with a new superintendent coming into her district. Same tools, same starting posture: come in human first.
“After the master’s, I’m ready to put in another five years instead of two,” Kristy says. “I’m not ready to hang up my hat yet.”
If you recognize yourself here
If you’re an educator reading this and wondering whether the daily work you’re doing on yourself is leading anywhere, Kristy’s arc is one data point among many. It says the pathway from a two-word check-in to a school board microphone is walkable, and the credential and container that made it walkable for her aren’t exotic. A master’s degree. Monthly training. A research question about your own classroom.
Breathe for Change has trained 250,000 educators and served 750 district partners. Kristy is one of them. She’s what happens when the inner work meets a structured container long enough for the outer work to catch up.
If you lead a school, a department, or a district and want to build this kind of capacity across your staff, whole-school educator wellness and leadership development is where that conversation starts. If you’re earlier in your own inner work and want a low-friction way to begin, TeacherCon is a free monthly three-day online event that teaches the Human Intelligence framework live with the faculty.
The question Kristy asked that board wasn’t rhetorical, she wanted an answer, and over the course of the year the seven people on the dais started giving her one. The question worth turning back on yourself has the same shape. What if the inner work you’re already doing is preparing you for something you can’t yet see?
Hear Kristy tell her full arc in her own words on A Work of Heart, the Breathe for Change podcast, where she talks with Dr. Ilana Nankin about the morning circle, the master’s, and the union presidency.
