By Kaitlyn Chantry and Ben Beane

We attended SXSW EDU 2026 expecting big ideas and ambitious sessions—but what stayed with us most were the moments that showed what’s already possible. Across sessions, we saw districts rethinking long‑standing constraints, educators sharing practical shifts already underway in schools, and systems making meaningful progress despite very real challenges.

While dozens of school and district leaders stepped up to provide inspiration, we narrowed it down to five standouts. These are the folks who, to us, represented the most exciting and transformational change at the conference—leaders who bolstered our belief in public education. There’s nothing hypothetical about the impact they’re having on students right now.

Haywood County Schools is using data to get ahead of chronic absenteeism

We know that tutoring, small group instruction, and high-quality curriculum can’t have their intended impact if students aren’t coming to school. Early Monday morning, we attended “Missing Millions: Confronting the Attendance Crisis.” The session focused on how to get kids back into the classroom amid chronic absenteeism that’s still above pre-pandemic levels. Nicole Bond, Director of Attendance & Enrollment for Haywood County Schools (Tennessee), shared how her district has set up early warning systems so that PowerSchool attendance data seamlessly gets into the right hands after just a few incidents—instead of much later when extreme cases trigger a red flag.

The data goes to each child’s cross-functional attendance team so that they can reach out to the family with empathy and active listening. These conversations often allow district leaders to understand not only individual children’s needs, but also identify more widely felt root causes that can be addressed for a bigger impact. (For instance, family outreach resulted in a district-wide effort to establish a food pantry to help with food insecurity.)

By taking action early on, the outreach was felt by caregivers as proactive and supportive rather than punitive or simply compliant. According to Bond, “It’s easier to build trust when families feel that there’s a group of caring adults who genuinely want their children to succeed.”

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Pearl Public School District is setting a new standard for AI in public education

To say that Superintendent Chris Chism is at the forefront of AI use in public education would be an understatement. He’s given over 250 presentations in 14 states on the topic and has been invited by Dell to talk about how he helped Pearl Public School District (Mississippi) build its own dedicated AI server.

What set Chism’s Monday masterclass above the dozens of other AI-related sessions this week was the breadth of tangible use cases he gave for how he’s using AI right now in his district: from inside the classroom to teacher preparation and even in district administration.

For him, being an early adopter of AI wasn’t optional: “I thought, we better get on board with this quickly and make good decisions.”

Inside classrooms, Pearl Public School students have used AI to build stories together: responding to prompts, illustrating key scenes, and taking a multiple-choice quiz afterwards to test understanding. An experienced teacher was ready to quit, overwhelmed by the extra hours needed to grade papers. Chism walked her through how to upload standards, her rubric, and exemplars to speed up grading and avoid hours of work on nights and weekends. And in the central office, Chism was able to input state, regional, and local building codes so that facilities managers could take a photo to find out right away whether something was up to code.

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Chester County School District’s blended learning models are solving teacher vacancies

In day two’s “Beyond Bricks: Hybrid Models that Boost Outcomes,” we learned about one district that, in the face of persistent teacher vacancies, proactively filled hard-to-staff roles with virtual teachers. Wendell Sumter, Assistant Superintendent of HR in rural Chester County School District (South Carolina) highlighted that the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated already existing teacher shortages. Parents were concerned with the quality of instruction that students were receiving, so the district made a big bet on making sure that all instruction, provided in-person or virtual, was conducted by certified teachers—not substitutes. The goal wasn’t just to find teachers, but to find the best solution that works for schools and students.

In these classrooms, virtual teachers provide instruction while an in-person paraprofessional provides support for students. One aspect that has made this model successful is integrating school leaders into the hiring and planning process, ensuring that each virtual candidate is a good fit for the school. They also made efforts to embed the teachers into the school culture, inviting them to orientations, professional development opportunities, and meetings with principals, as well as all meetings with parents.

Sumter shared that innovation sometimes means letting go of assumptions, like that high-quality instruction could only be provided by an in-person teacher, or that a model like this couldn’t work in all classrooms, like special education.

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The School District of Philadelphia is driving improvements in math outcomes

What does it take to reimagine math education? During a day three session, “Solving the Math Problem: Leading Change in K-12 Systems,” we heard from Chief of Curriculum and Instruction Nyshawana Francis-Thompson on how this is being done in the School District of Philadelphia.

Math outcomes became a core focus for Philadelphia’s new superintendent and strategic plan, which included adopting new high-quality instructional materials and ensuring that every student had access to 9^th grade Algebra. The district was intentional about how it engaged stakeholders—from teachers to principals to the community—to secure buy-in and make sure everyone was aligned on why math instruction was a key priority.

Dr. Francis-Thompson also highlighted a few ways that they shifted practice. To build educator capacity, they partnered with higher education institutions to train middle school teachers in Algebra, so that they were more confident teaching the material and could reflect on instruction practices. They also worked with earlier-grade teachers to help them understand how their own curricula connected to and would prepare students for Algebra. And the district made some shifts to school schedules, mandating a set number of minutes for math instruction, and supplementing that learning with before-, after-, and summer-school time.

One key to the district’s success? Engaging with families to help them understand the value of math. For Philadelphia, improved math outcomes are an opportunity for families to experience serious economic mobility, a vision that’s supported and monitored by the governor, mayor, and school board.

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New York City Public Schools is setting a new standard for career pathways

An annual favorite at SXSW EDU, this year’s Tomorrow’s Principal Podcast from Gene Pinkard and Nancy Gutiérrez featured two leaders at the forefront of education innovation. In a conference full of content on college and career pathways, we were most excited by the work being done at Principal Erika Hurtado-Valentino’s Northwell School of Health Sciences in NYCPS. At first glance, the new school, which opened its doors for the first time this fall, is mostly a vehicle for the students to participate in healthcare internships and clinical training.

But what really impressed us about Principal Hurtado-Valentino’s approach is her vision to design beyond the traditional CTE school. In many districts, CTE is thought of as a pathway only for certain—often lower-performing—students. Northwell, however, has been intentionally designed as an academically diverse school, with the full range of advanced coursework and electives that students would experience elsewhere. Students in grades 9-12 all have access to AP courses in a variety of subjects, students can earn college credits, and the school offers music, dance, art, and athletics.

Why change the paradigm for CTE schools? Principal Hurtado-Valentino’s answer is simple: “We are agents of change. I don’t accept kids’ destinies.

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