Abbie Ridenour is the Founding Executive Director of Summit Tamalpais. Abbie’s passion for education reform began while in undergrad at UCLA as she researched the benefits of diversity in schools and worked directly with students and families who desired change in their educational experience. She started her teaching career in East Los Angeles, teaching history in both large comprehensive and small charter high school settings in LAUSD. She joined Summit in 2010 to help launch Everest Public High School, Summit’s second high school in Redwood City, CA. She has since served over seven years at Summit both as a history teacher and in school leadership at Everest, Shasta, and Tam. One of her proudest moments at Summit was watching her mentor group walk across the stage at graduation after working alongside them over their four-year journey at Summit and ensuring that 100% of their graduating class was accepted to a four-year college.

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Before being one of the co-leaders at Summit Tam, Aukeem most recently was a Dean of Students and a Habits, Culture and Community (HCC) teacher at Summit Preparatory Charter High School, our flagship Summit school in Redwood City, CA. He started his work with Summit Public Schools when he help build the first iteration of the Summit Learning Platform in summer of 2013. He taught Social Studies and mentored students for four years, now in universities ranging from Berkeley to New York! Over his time at Summit Prep, he worked with the Summit Prep community to create a vibrant student leadership program. He built local service leadership opportunities, created student-led ethnic studies courses, social justice service trips to various countries with students, and helped supplant a functioning student government system. Before Summit he taught middle school social studies and language arts at Portland Public Schools and was involved with city and state civic education initiatives. He obtained both a BA and MA from Lewis & Clark College. He loves slam poetry, great food, and dancing to the music of life.

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