January 6, 2009
HOME > About Us > Board Members
Bernice Stafford
Bernice Stafford, Retired Vice President of School Strategies and Evaluation at PLATO Learning, Inc., was a Lightspan, Inc., co-founder. She moved to PLATO in November 2003 when Lightspan was acquired. Before joining Lightspan in fall 1993, she was Director of Sales Programs for Jostens Learning Corporation. Prior to Jostens Learning, she was a marketing executive for the Tandy Corporation/Radio Shack Education Division.
Ms. Stafford began her career as a classroom teacher more than 40 years ago, transitioning shortly thereafter to early childhood administration. Throughout her career, she also taught college-level early childhood development and early childhood courses, public and private, in this country and abroad. In the early 1980s, she lived and worked in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, leading an international team of educators in the design and initial implementation of the Kingdom’s kindergarten (ages three through grade two) program. Over the span of a 20-year corporate career, Ms. Stafford has mastered the art and science of combining business strategy with education policy and funding and is recognized by her peers as one of the leading experts in those areas.
A past chair of the National Education Knowledge Industry Association, Ms. Stafford currently serves on the boards of the Southeast Regional Vision for Education, Partnership for Dynamic Learning, Agency for Instructional Technology, and was recently appointed a member of the WestEd Regional Educational Laboratory Board. She is also a member of the California Public Schools Accountability Act Advisory Committee and the Alternative Accountability Subcommittee, having been appointed by the State Superintendent of Public Education. Ms. Stafford is co-author of “A Science-based Development and Implementation Model for Online and CD-ROM Curriculum Programs,” included in the Second Edition of the Handbook on Literacy and Technology published by Lawrence Ehrlbaum Associates. In addition, Ms. Stafford is a frequent presenter at education conferences on topics ranging from how to close the minority achievement gap to the use of state-of-the-art learning technology in the teaching and learning environment. She has a B.A. in Sociology and an M.A. in Early Childhood Development from the University of California at Berkeley.
August 2005