Background: Bill Durbin is the academic strategy senior adviser at Bellwether Education Partners. Bill has worked in the education field over the past 18 years, focusing on school leader management, school performance management, and network growth strategy. For the past two years, Bill served as the Chief of Schools at DSST Public Schools in Denver, Colorado. In this role, he was responsible for managing 12 schools and 5,000 students, leadership pipeline management, leader development programming, and the yearly school planning processes.
Previous to DSST, Bill served as YES Prep Public Schools' Head of Schools from 2009-2014, where he was responsible for identifying, training, and managing school directors at the thirteen YES Prep schools serving 8,000 students in Houston, Texas. As part of this work, Bill also served as a steering committee member for the SKY Partnership, a district-charter school partnership between Spring Branch Independent School District, KIPP Public Schools, and YES Prep Public Schools. Before managing the YES Prep portfolio of schools, Bill spent 2002-2009 co-founding and leading three schools: YES Prep North Central, YES Prep East End, and YES Prep Gulfton. Bill started his career in 1998 as a founding teacher at YES Prep Southeast.
Bill is a Pahara-Aspen Education Fellow. In 2010, he earned a master’s degree in Business Administration from Rice University as part of the Rice Entrepreneurship in Education Program. Bill also completed a master’s in Educational Administration and Supervision at the University of Houston and a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Illinois. He currently lives in Houston.
Why I do this work: A student’s zip code should not determine his or her access to a quality education. I have committed my entire career to supporting organizations in their mission to increase the number of high-quality school options across all neighborhoods. I look forward to the opportunity to continue this work at Bellwether and support organizations in their growth plans to ensure every student in America has access to a high-quality school option.