Team

Casey Pilgeram, a wife and mother of two, is a practicing public school psychologist with a decade of experience working with children from pre-K through high school. Eight years into her career, suffering from moral injury, Casey was on the brink of leaving education. 

But one night, her perspective, energy, and motivation fundamentally shifted after learning about our inherited public education model’s historical origins and intentions: to create obedient and compliant future laborers. Through this history, she gained clarity about the ways our inherited model, still mostly operational in schools nationwide, conflicts with the brain’s non-negotiable precursors for learning: the need for safety and connection. The witnessing this incongruity between our inherited model's intention and subsequent design and the goal of educators reignited Casey’s passion and energy to stay in public schools and work together for positive change.

Casey believes in philosopher George Santayana's famous claim that those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it. In her work of straw polling over 1,000 people, Casey estimates only approximately 1-5% of educators were taught or know about our model's problematic original design. Yet we cannot see what we do not yet know. As attested by her own experience, Casey trusts that knowing the history of our model is not only transformational, it's revolutionary. Therefore the primary focus of her work thus far has been spreading greater awareness about our shared history.

In July of 2024, inspired to bring this awareness to a national stage, Casey attended the National Education Association Representatives Assembly, the largest democratic deliberative assembly in the world. She proposed three items related to this work to 7,000 delegates.

Casey believes in children, human wisdom, and the beneficence of the earth! She envisions a future where understanding our past empowers us to recast our educational model into one that centers the humans within it and the communities they touch. She believes by changing our educational system, we can birth a safer, more just world for generations to come.