Hedy is the founder and executive director of the non-profit initiative, Attendance Works which promotes equal opportunities to learn and advances student success by reducing chronic absence. Founded in 2010, Attendance Works is the nation’s go-to resource for attendance policy and practice. The website serves over 400,000 users each year. Attendance Works successfully moved chronic absence from a little-known term to a required reporting and optional school accountability metric in the federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).  A skilled presenter, facilitator, researcher and writer, Hedy co-authored the seminal report, Present, Engaged and Accounted For: The Critical Importance of Addressing Chronic Absence in the Early Grades, as well as numerous other articles about student attendance.

Nancy Ludu is a Program Specialist for the Family and Community Engagement Department in Elk Grove Unified School District.  She supports Attendance, Enrollment and TalkingPoints for EGUSD.  Nancy oversees an Attendance Team that assists sites so they are best able to serve and support the families and students across the district.  She began her career teaching elementary school in neighboring Sacramento City Unified School District and taught in EGUSD for almost 20 years before moving to administration.  She is passionate about providing opportunities for families to partner with schools to provide the best opportunities for all students.

Kate Pechacek currently serves as the Head of Impact at Talking Points, as the most recent of several roles in the area of education technology over the last eight years. She began her nearly thirty year career in education as a secondary math teacher. In addition to fifteen years as a teacher, she has also served in districts across the country in multiple site and district leadership roles in the areas of curriculum, instruction, and assessment as well as MTSS. She is passionate about ensuring equity, disrupting predictability, and narrowing opportunity gaps.