Wilson School Teacher Solution Summit
Brought to you by Million Dollar Teacher Project x Interform x Center for the Future of Arizona
Our Goal
Phase 1: Hold space to cultivate a collaborative vision and pragmatic projects for supportive environments at Wilson School where teachers want to stay, so they can thrive with students & communities.
Phase 2: Amplify successful approaches tested in Wilson as a pioneering school to a district, county, and state level to inform policy and funding for wider systems change.
Who's Involved
Core Organizing Team
Lloyd Hopkins - Convener
Executive Director
& Founder
Million Dollar Teacher Project
Lloyd Hopkins is an author, philanthropist and organizational leader with extensive experience in community and nonprofit work. He has worked in and around education for 18 years.  He graduated from Arizona State University with his degree in Nonprofit Management and Leadership and took his passion for ensuring quality education for all to launch the teacher recruitment and retention program, Million Dollar Teacher Project. 
Adam French - Faciliator
Former Board Member
Million Dollar Teacher Project
Co-Founder
Interform
Adam is a systems change strategist, facilitator, and designer. He has worked with dozens of systems change entrepreneurs across climate, education, and well-being to clarify and actualize their full potential first through emote.design, and now through Interform. He studied Innovation in Society at Arizona State university and brings expertise from the fields of design thinking, living systems thinking, and participatory futures.
Peter Boyle - Strategist and Connector
Senior Director, Education
Center for the Future of Arizona
Peter Boyle is the Senior Director, Education at the Center for the Future of Arizona ("CFA"), leading CFA's education team and its work with 75 districts statewide in the areas of educational leadership, college- and career-connected pathways, and student-centered teaching and learning.
Partners for expanding the initiative:
We've developed relationships with the following organizations around this initiative and can connect them with project teams.
  • Office of Maricopa County Superintendent
  • The New Teacher Project
  • AZ Teacher Residency Program
  • Evolving Education / Teacher Powered Schools Initiative
  • Empower Education
  • Valley of the Sun United Way
Why Converge Around Solutions for Teachers?

Teachers could be the keystone for healthy communities.

Our teachers are the point where our schools influence the community through the way they develop children. They have the potential to not only be educators, but collaborators with parents, community leaders that activate local development initiatives, or part of a student's support circle when they're having a tough time. In communities where parents are struggling to make ends meet and support their children, teachers introduce children to the world beyond their neighborhood. How teachers are equipped to do this makes a huge difference on the odds of wether kids will reach their potential 3,000 Students is the average amount of students a teacher affects over their career. 12 Powerful Statistics That Prove Why Teachers Matter 75% Of students say that they see teachers as both mentors and role models. 12 Powerful Statistics That Prove Why Teachers Matter +$500,000 is the estimated effect on student lifetime earnings when they have a teacher in the 90th percentile within an average Arizona class size. From the Economic value of Teacher Quality Long-term impact "Teachers who improve students’ noncognitive skills also improve long-term outcomes that include their odds of graduating from high school." Understanding a Teacher’s Long-Term Impact "Teachers are one of the key intervention points in child mental health, which affects the well-being and performance of parents." Over 5 years at state average 50% retention rate, teacher turnover costs

Teachers need more supportive & equitable systems to fulfill their role, especially in underserved communities.

Many teachers are resigning to find jobs that are higher paying and less stressful, leading to a teacher shortage where educators that are in classrooms aren't equipped with the support they need to activate their role as enablers of healthy classrooms and communities. 73% Of teachers share that they do indeed feel frequent job-related stress. Teacher and Principal Stress Running at Twice the Rate of General Working Public, Hindering Pandemic Recovery Nearly 1/5 teachers have to work a second job during the active school term. Does it pay to pay teachers more? Evidence from Texas 70% Of teacher positions from K-12 in Arizona were either vacant or filled by people who don’t meet standard teaching requirements. Severe Teacher Shortage in Arizona Continues - ASPAA Arizona is 51st among the United States, including the District of Columbia, when it came to the amount spent on actual instruction, at $4,801 per pupil. 78% Of teachers who are women in the U.S. felt frequent stress, compared to 59% of teachers who are men.

We need community driven & collaborative solutions to support teachers.

Our strategy is to gather momentum in a school to cultivate a teacher support movement that benefits the community, and informs policy around talent retention in education. Many parents, administrators, students, and teachers know that the learning and community building potential of a school happens when teachers are able to stick around for a while. But because of high-stress jobs, poor compensation, and inflexible school schedules, it can be incredibly difficult to create an environment where teachers don't just stay, but thrive. We see an opportunity to leverage the national attention on employee retention in the education space by first focusing on engaging communities on the local level. Each community has unique needs, culture, and policies. We can't make meaningful, creative improvements on the district level unless everyone is able to contribute to the process - parents, admins, students, and teachers alike. So we've created a container for communities to come together around improving the experience of educators and school administrative staff, so they can more joyfully and effectively serve the community.

The Wilson Teacher Solution Summit Agenda
Pre-Summit: Source the Creative Team
We see the fall being a good time to engage in the first summit convening, as we can prototype initiatives through the activity of the school year
  • Send out a call for teachers, students, board members, mental health service providers working with the district, and other community members who are passionate about creating a better education working environment.
  • For first summit, limit attendance to 30 people, ensuring there's equitable representation for each role in the education system as well as different cultural groups.
  • We envision the summit being either a full 8 hour day
  • Compensation will be offered to those who attend at $30/hour
  • Estimated time commitments from project teams after the convening:
  • 2 hours of meeting / month
  • 5 hours of individual work / month
PART 1:
Context Building & Collective Visioning Breakout Groups
Purpose Sharing Circle
First, we'll have a facilitated discussion, with an apple acting as our talking stick
What makes Wilson Special? Why is it valuable for good teachers to stay in Wilson School? What are the benefits for the students, teachers, parents, and staff?
1.5 Hour
Visioning Breakouts
After circling up and understanding our shared motivations to keep teachers in the community, we'll start to paint a vision for the future.
We'll break out into groups of 5, making sure that there's a healthy mix of community members (parents, students, teachers, admin) in each group.
We'll step into the frame of being individuals, working together from our roles. Each group will have someone in the "leader" and their responsibility is to make sure that the group moves through the exercise and everyone's voice is heard.
Each group will also have a note taker, who writes down and/or illustrates key points being discussed.
We'll discuss and illustrate this question:
What might a future look like where all teachers stick around and enrich the community through mutually beneficial relationships?
Who else is involved in this future? How is their experience better than the current situation?
What's holding us back from bringing this future into being?
Each group will then share their vision with the larger group, providing opportunity for unique insights, creating motivation for collaboration, and inspiring a collective vision that can be shared after the workshop.
1 Hour
Lunch & Recess
After an exciting first half of the day, we'll break for lunch and a bit of play to let the information settle and get into a creative state as we prepare our bodies and minds for the second half of the event, where we'll get more focused on goals to set for shifting the system.
1 Hour
PART 2:
Activating Collaborations Through Project Creation + Planning
Project Discovery
After lunch, we'll reconvene in our breakout groups and hold space for the whole group reflection around key insights that have been uncovered so far.
Then, we'll dive in to breakout sessions where we create projects that tap the unique potential of the diverse stakeholders in the group.
30 mins: Asset Inventory
What are the unique skills, capabilities, resources, and connections within the current group?
We'll use the five forms of capital framework to help groups understand the social, financial, natural, produced, and human capital resources in each group, so their ideas are grounded in their unique potential.
1.5 hours Idea Generation
We'll give breakout groups a structured framework to inspire grounded creativity for transformative and feasible projects:
Given our unique resources and the things restricting us, what projects could we initiate to create our vision of an ideal future for teachers, school admin, and the community?
  • 30 minute round of brainstorming,
  • 15 minutes where people get to walk around and browse other projects
  • 30 mins prioritization based on feasibility + impact
15 minute break
1 hour - refining and planning to execute the ideas
  • Of the top project, what's the specific aim?
  • What key activities or resources will the project leverage, and how?
  • What's the rough timeline of implementation?
  • What key partners will they need to engage to bring it to life? What's in it for them?
  • What questions do you want to ask the group to help with your project concept?
They'll work with sticky notes on a project canvas to document their thoughts. This will be digitized after the event.
30 mins idea sharing: At the end of this session, each group will share out their projects, with an open floor for the group to answer the questions each project team has.
3.5 Hours
Why Wilson?
The Teacher Solution Summit as a Systemic Intervention
The Teacher Solution Summit is designed as a catalytic container for systemic transformation in education, centered on community co-creation and educator well-being. This initiative activates a coalition of educators, community leaders, and institutional partners to reimagine the role of schools as hubs for thriving communities—beginning with Wilson School District as a pilot site.
We are targeting the talent retention and support system within public education. Rather than treating teacher turnover as an isolated HR challenge, we address the root conditions—such as community disconnection, policy rigidity, and inequitable support structures—that cause educator burnout, especially in underserved communities.
The Teacher Solution Summit is a community-rooted effort to transform teacher support systems by positioning educators as central to thriving schools and communities. By convening parents, administrators, students, and teachers, we co-create place-based solutions that address the root causes of teacher attrition. This pilot at Wilson serves as a scalable model, informing district and state-level policies. Through coalition leadership and strong partner alignment, the Summit activates systemic change that advances educator well-being, student outcomes, and community health.
Project Scoring Rubric
We have a framework to score different projects on key dimensions so funders can make informed decisions that align with their goals
Each category will be calculated 1-10 and multiplied by the weight
Each project is evaluated on a 1 to 10 scale within six core categories.
  • A score of 1 represents a project that is unclear, untested, underdeveloped, or lacks alignment with the goals of the Summit or broader systems change.
  • A score of 10 reflects a project that is fully formed, well-evidenced, deeply participatory, and highly aligned with the goals of improving teacher experience and driving systemic change.
Think of it like this:
  • 1–3: Early-stage idea with limited detail, unclear partners, or minimal grounding in evidence or vision.
  • 4–6: Solid concept with some clarity and potential, but gaps in execution strategy, stakeholder engagement, or scale.
  • 7–10: Well-thought-out initiative, backed by diverse support and/or data, with tangible next steps and room to evolve.
Scorers should review both what’s written in the project proposal and what’s visible in the team’s partnerships, clarity, and readiness to act.
Intended Outcomes
🗺️ Growing an in-depth understanding of how we can engage all stakeholders in creating a thriving environment
🎇 Unified momentum and clear shared direction around strategies for supporting teachers
🤝 High value and purposeful networking opportunities for all who're participating.
🌀 Collaborative projects with multi-stakeholder buy-in to create the ideal future for Teachers and community
🔗 The formation of an on-going network that continues to support the projects formed during the convening.
Looking Ahead
To sustain the projects and connections forged in this solution summit, we'll need to continue to support them as they develop. We plan to do this through the following actions post-summit:
  • Regular project team meetups (quarterly)
  • Strategy + networking by the core organizing team to establish relationships between projects + potential funders and stakeholders.
  • Set up an online space with the project strategies + groups from the convening for participants to communicate and move projects forward
  • Solution summit re-convening to present the projects and rally support from the larger community (annually)
The Ask