Mission: empower teachers and students to achieve excellence, create outside the box new solutions; copy proven effective global solutions; build and freely share learning resources; acknowledge and support teachers to reduce burnout & turnover while creating Hope.

Focus: Direct community action outside government or school district control. Prevent short term Tipping Point towards burnout while advocating long term change. Create environment where every good teacher in the state wants to be. Focus on high quality, best cost product with low employee turnover building a Costco school model not Walmart. Target excellence in basic Reading and Math skills by improving ranking 10% yearly (note: Alaska currently ranked 49th worst)

Starfish Structure: Decentralized, adaptable, innovative, responsive, and able to regenerate without top-down control structure. Unlike centralized structure, avoids a single point of failure or control. Information & decisions flow more freely, allowing fast response to changing circumstances. Distributed network model encourages diverse ideas and experimentation.

Roles: Champion takes direct action for a cause; Advocate spreads the ideology and attract new members; Connector facilitates communication and collaboration within the network.

Resource Examples: “Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way” by Amanda Ripley; “Starfish and Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations” by Brafman/Beckstrom; “Lateral Thinking: Creativity Step by Step” by Edward De Bono

Goal: Build prototype system that can be copied to other locations to solve similar types of problems.

Quote: "I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something & because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do."