ERS Team

Jess O’Connor

As leader of ERS’ School Design Practice Area, Jess brings a deep understanding of the resource shifts schools need to make to implement strategies that improve student outcomes, and the conditions necessary to scale and sustain those strategies across the system. 

Since joining ERS in 2015, she’s worked with over 20 large metropolitan districts—including Tulsa Public Schools, Baltimore City Schools, Oakland Unified School District, Chicago Public Schools, and Boston Public Schools—to assess their resource conditions and redesign schedules and staffing plans to improve student and teacher experiences. She helped launch ERS’s inaugural School Design Summit in 2017, bringing together district leaders to assess their system’s conditions and create action plans to scale high-impact school designs in their district.

She has also supported leaders in JeffCo Public Schools, Shelby County (Memphis), Albuquerque, Prince William County, and others to implement new structures and policies that support strategic school designs, including designing student-centered funding systems and evolving policies around class size, seat time, and collaborative planning. 

Jess has also worked directly in schools, getting to know exactly what it looks like to experience day-to-day operations in a variety of school contexts. Early in her career, she launched a tutoring program at Project Pride, a dropout prevent program in rural Virginia, reorganizing students’ schedules to accelerate learning while balancing out-of-school demands. At a growing charter network organization, she oversaw operations and systems development across five schools and supported the design and launch of a new competency-based high school that became Rhode Island’s highest-ranked public charter school. 

Jess holds an M.A. from Brown University in Urban Education Policy, and a B.A. in Economics from Washington & Lee University.

Previous Experience

Education Pioneers Graduate School Fellow
Boston Afterschool & Beyond

Associate Director of Operations
Blackstone Valley Prep Mayoral Academies

Research Consultant
The Rhode Island Department of Education

Education

M.A., Urban Education Policy
Brown University

B.A., Economics & Business Administration
Washington and Lee University