OH First Lady to offer keynote at Strive Community Forum on Education at Xavier

The upcoming Strive Community Forum on Education has gotten a big boost with the announcement that Ohio First Lady Frances Strickland will be the keynote speaker at the June 26 event. Strickland, an education advocate and Kentucky native, is also scheduled to lead one of the forum’s breakout sessions at Xavier University.


Strive is a public-private collaborative aimed at improving education in Greater Cincinnati. Based in downtown Cincinnati, was founded in 2003 as a subsidiary of KnowledgeWorks Foundation, an education initiative funder. Strive is focused on developing Cincinnati’s urban core, including cities in Northern Kentucky, through identifying better education strategies from birth through some form of college into a career.


The community forum is free and open to the public. It will be from 8:30 a.m. to 3:15 p.m. at the University’s Cintas Center, and lunch will be free for people who pre-register. The forum is being hosted jointly by Strive and Xavier’s Community Building Institute.


The forum’s goal is to get feedback from the Greater Cincinnati community on how to move education improvement forward. Among the breakout sessions theme are: “Increasing the Pace of School Improvement,” “Academic Rigor and Teaching Excellence,” and “College Access and Success.” See the entire schedule here.


Strickland has a doctorate in educational psychology at the University of Kentucky, where she met her future husband, Ohio governor Ted Strickland. She is a former public school educational psychologist and a children’s book author, who wrote The Little Girl Who Grew up to Be Governor about former Kentucky Governor Martha Layne Collins.


To register, contact Nancy Hackett at 513-745-3264, or [email protected]


Writer: Feoshia Henderson
Source: Laurel Bauer, Media Relations Coordinator Xavier University

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