How I went from "What's an adoption?" to over 50% district adoption against a 25% goal, on a statewide literacy bid I'd never run before.
I was running field marketing for the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic regions at Lexia Learning when leadership came to me with a project. Florida's State Board of Education was running a statewide literacy curriculum adoption, and they wanted me to lead our submission from the marketing side of thigns. I'd never run an adoption before. I actually didn't even know what an adoption was. Two years later, we'd doubled our goal by hitting over 50% district adoption against a first-year goal of 25%.
The quick stats:
Goal: 25% district adoption in year one
Outcome: over 50% district adoption in year one
Continued growth in the years after I moved on
Built two complete submission packages from scratch: elementary and middle school categories
First marketing-led adoption submission at Lexia (previously handled by sales)
Cross-functional team spanning marketing, education, sales, and product
Project ran during peak COVID, fully remote, while K–12 was being reshaped in real time
The messy middle:
The crash course: I started this project not knowing what a curriculum adoption was. The state board of education creates a shortlist of approved curriculum vendors, then school districts choose from that list. Categories are organized by grade band and subject. The submission package has to clear bars at every stage from the unboxing experience to how curriculum standards map to specific state requirements. I had not handled a project like this previously, so the first thing I set out to do was learn and understand the process. By taking some time to listen I was able to walk anyone through the entire process from criteria to timelines to judging in six weeks.
The partnership: Kimberly, my counterpart on the Education team, was the engine of this project alongside me. She had a strong history in curriculum and experience working across education, training, and sales at Lexia, which meant she knew where the answers lived inside the company. I knew marketing; she knew curriculum – we were complementary in the best possible way. I lost count of how many 5am deadlines we hit together from our respective homes during COVID. The bigger lesson: cross-functional work isn't a deck or a meeting. It's people in the trenches taking turns being the expert.
The package: Everything about the submission had to meet strict criteria at every step. The box opening experience for the commitee. The way grade-band color coding let judges find what they needed at a glance. How curriculum standards mapped to Florida's specific state requirements. The story we told about why our curriculum belonged on the shortlist. We built two complete packages from the ground up: elementary and middle school. Both shipped before deadlines we'd had to renegotiate internally to even get the chance. The packages were the visible part of every cross-functional decision the team had made in the previous six months.
The 50% adoption result against our 25% goal is a testament to the work ethic and skill of the team. My overarching management work is something I'm especially proud of: walking into an unfamiliar domain, mapping where the expertise lives across teams, building the partnerships you need to execute, and turning what you learn into something that performs. That's the kind of collaboration and decision making that I aim to carry with me to any project.
