Danielle Crain has more than 15 years of experience providing technical assistance to support policy development, systems improvement, and to address equity issues. Ms. Crain led the National Comprehensive Center’s (NCC) Strategic Planning for Continued Recovery initiative. She also serves as the NCC’s CCNetwork Liaison Lead, managing the CCNetwork Liaison team to maintain communication with the 14 Regional Comprehensive Centers (RCCs) and 4 Content Centers. She also serves as the Subcontract Director for the OSEP-funded Center for IDEA Fiscal Reporting (CIFR) where she also leads production of tools and products and provides targeted and intensive technical assistance on improving IDEA fiscal reporting to SEAs. Ms. Crain holds a Certificate in Education Finance.

Dr. Jill Lammert is the Co-Director of the National Comprehensive Center and an Associate Vice President in the Education Studies practice at Westat. She has 20+ years of experience designing, conducting, and evaluating programs to support education policy and reform, plus providing exceptional capacity-building and evaluation expertise. Dr. Lammert also co-leads the Center to Improve Program and Project Performance, which delivers evaluation technical assistance to Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) grantees to help them measure performance and improve outcomes for students with disabilities.

Dr. Ventura Rodriguez joined ERS as a partner in September 2021. Since joining ERS, he has led numerous partnerships with school districts and state education agencies. Recent projects include conducting a resource diagnostic in the Metro Nashville Public Schools to support the alignment of resources to a multi-year strategy, developing an elementary scheduling and staffing guide for the Nebraska Department of Education, supporting Dallas ISD’s Racial Equity Working Group, and partnering with the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to support a cohort of seven high schools to redesign their schedules and staffing plans aligned to priorities for student experiences. Ventura also leads ERS' State Practice Area. In this role, he supports ERS’ work to enable the design, implementation, and continuous improvement of effective and ambitious state-level policies that create critical enabling conditions for school and system leaders to transform how they use resources (people, time, and money) to support schools and students.