Our Call for Presenters is now closed. Stay tuned as we announce more speakers and presenters!

Keynote Speaker - Peter Groff, president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools

We are pleased to announce that our first keynote speaker will be Peter Groff, the new president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. He will address our attendees on Friday, October 15th, 2010.

Before joining the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, Groff served as the director of the Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships at the U. S. Department of Education. Prior to accepting that position, Groff was the founder and executive director of the University of Denver's Center for New Politics and Policy (formerly Center for African American Policy), and lectured at the University's Public Policy program.

Groff also served as the 47th president of the Colorado State Senate and was the first African-American in Colorado to hold that post, and only the third African-American in the nation's history to hold the gavel as state Senate president. Senator Groff, who was called the "Conscience of the Senate," served in the Colorado General Assembly for nine years and passed landmark legislation creating visionary education reform measures, prohibiting racial profiling and requiring booster seats for young children.  

Born in Chicago, Groff was raised in Denver. He has a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Redlands (Calif.), a Juris Doctorate from the University of Denver College of Law and an honorary Ph.D. from the University of Denver.

Keynote Speaker - Donald Hense, Founder and Chairman of the Board, Friendship Public Charter Schools

Mr. Hense is Founder and Chairman of the Board of Friendship Public Charter Schools in Washington, DC. Friendship is the largest chartered public school in the nation serving more than 3,900 students on five campuses in the nation’s capital. Friendship’s Chamberlain campus located on Potomac Avenue, Southeast serves more than 800 children and is the largest elementary school in the District of Columbia; the Friendship Junior Academy which serves more than 700 children is the largest middle school in the District of Columbia, and the Friendship Collegiate Academy with more than 1200 students is the second largest high school in the city, and home of the first Gates early College program, which allows students to begin taking college courses in the tenth grade. Friendship has the unique distinction of issuing through the District of Columbia’s Industrial Revenue Bond program $59.8 million in bonds to purchase and renovate its schools, the largest such charter school offering in history.

Mr. Hense is Chairman of the Center for Youth and Family Investment a highly successful organization that provides extended learning programs to more than 2,000 children each day. Mr. Hense is a graduate of Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia. He attended graduate school at Stanford University and completed all requirements for the Ph.D. except the dissertation. He was a Rockefeller Intern in Economics at Cornell University; a Merrill Scholar to
the University of Ghana; a Ford Foundation Fellow at Stanford and a Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.

Mr. Hense has served as Vice President of the National Urban League; Director of Development of the Children’s Defense Fund; Treasurer on the Board of the 21st Century foundation in New York; Director of Governmental Relations at Howard University, Boston University and
Dartmouth College. He is former Vice President of Development of Prairie View A & M University of the Texas A & M System.

Mr. Hense is the co‐founder of the Bridges to Friendship Initiative, which provided the early impetus for the revitalization of the Navy Yard and was recognized by Vice President Gore as a model community initiative.

He serves on the Board of the Center for Education Reform, the DC Arts and Humanities Collaborative and is Treasurer of the DC Association of Chartered Public Schools. He is listed in Who’s Who in America and Who’s Who in the World.

Keynote Speaker- Senator Mike Johnston

Mike Johnston represents Northeast Denver in the Colorado State Senate where he sits on the Education Committee, the Business, Labor, and Technology Committee and is Vice-Chair of the Finance Committee. Before arriving at the Senate, Mike served as a public school teacher and principal for more than 8 years. He was the co-founder and principal of MESA (Mapleton Expeditionary School of the Arts), a redesigned urban high school that made Colorado history when 100 percent of seniors were admitted to a 4 year college. His first experience teaching English in the Mississippi Delta with Teach For America led him to write his acclaimed education memoir, In the Deep Heart's Core. He went on to serve as the principal of two alternative high schools for Colorado students held in state custody, the Joan Farley Academy and the Marvin Foote Youth Detention Center.

Mike also co-founded New Leaders for New Schools, a national non-profit that recruits, prepares, and places outstanding urban school leaders. He has been an adjunct professor of Education Law at the University of Denver and serves as an education advisor to state and federal political campaigns around the country, including spending the last two years as education advisor to Barack Obama's presidential campaign and administration.

Mike lives in Denver with his wife Courtney, who is a Denver Deputy District Attorney, and their two sons Emmet and Seamus. Mike holds degrees from Yale College, the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and the Yale Law School.