Rebecca Sibilia

Founder / CEO

Rebecca Sibilia launched EdBuild in June of 2014. Prior to starting EdBuild, Rebecca served as the Chief Operating Officer and Vice President for Fiscal Strategy at StudentsFirst. In her fiscal strategy role, she led a team in analyzing per-pupil funding levels and state funding mechanisms that ensure "equity" and "adequacy" considerations. Her team also studied and made recommendations to state and district officials on directed reforms to support more innovative use of resources across the public education spectrum.

Prior to her work at StudentsFirst, she served as the Chief Financial Officer for the DC Office of the State Superintendent of Education, where she oversaw the investment of more than $1 billion in local, state, and federal student funding and the calculation of per-student funding based on state policy priorities. In prior roles, she created congressionally funded education programs; held state and local education policy roles; and developed venture philanthropy programs to serve low-income students in accessing quality education in appropriate settings.

Rebecca holds a Bachelors degree in Political Science from Clemson University and an honorary fellowship in American Government from the University of South Carolina.

Sharon Agnello

Operations Manager

Sharon served as Operations Manager and Executive Assistant for Rebecca Sibilia at EdBuild. She managed day-to-day operations, provided support for research products, and copyedited all written materials. As a sounding board for project ideas, she helped shape EdBuild's message and ensured the organization's products were framed for the audience outside of education finance.

Megan Brodzik

Senior Data Analyst

Megan worked as part of the data team to uncover compelling patterns and trends in the ways schools are funded. She came to EdBuild as a former high school mathematics teacher in an under-resourced public school with dual masters degrees in economic theory and educational policy and leadership.

At EdBuild, she was responsible for the data analysis of many research products including the neighbor inequality analyses of Fault Lines and Dismissed, and the national revenue-sharing model Clean Slate. She also created the R packages edbuildr and edbuildmapr to automate the downloading and processing of school district data, perform spatial analysis, and create formatted tables and maps.

Cecilia Depman

Senior Data Analyst

Cecilia worked on the data team to analyze the state funding systems.  She came to EdBuild after graduating with a masters degree in environmental policy and management. Her prior work focused on mapping vulnerability in urban food systems.  While at EdBuild, Cecilia built interactive modeling tools to make recommendations for school funding reforms in several states and developed the Data Dashboard, a dynamic platform which allows users to explore school district demographics and finances through customizable tables and plots. She also contributed to analysis and visualization for a number of research projects including 23 Billion and Dividing Lines through the creation of a COVID-19 school district database.

Marc DePoe

Senior Developer

Marc DePoe joined EdBuild because he knows that a quality education is a fundamental right for every student.

Working as EdBuild's Developer, Marc plays a crucial role in developing and maintaining our database architecture, and translating our policy ideas into interactive solutions for our stakeholders. Prior to his work at EdBuild, Marc worked with diverse and well-known clients such as UnitedHealthCare, Vice Media, and The White House, where he oversaw the development and launch of Michelle Obama's Let's Move! Cities, Towns and Counties initiative site.

Sara Hodges

Director of Data & Visualizations

Sara led data analysis, research, and visualization at EdBuild. Prior to EdBuild, she had an environmental mapping consultancy and worked on projects with the United Nations Environment Programme, New York Hall of Science, Carnegie Museum of Natural History, among others.  At EdBuild she contributed to all of EdBuild’s data-driven reports, and succeeded in including a map in nearly every EdBuild release.

Yi Li

Senior Policy Analyst

Yi worked on policy research and analysis for the National Voice team at EdBuild. Prior to joining EdBuild, Yi received a masters degree in philosophy and public policy, and assisted with research and speechwriting in the UK parliament on early education and other social policy issues.

During her time at EdBuild, Yi got into the weeds of school district border law, working on Fractured, a report highlighting school district secession efforts, and Frontier, a database of school district border laws. She also contributed to EdBuild's resources on school district funding formulas, FundEd and FundEd: Charters, and to a report on school funding reform, Making Change.

Matt Richmond

Chief Programs Officer

As Chief Program Officer, Matt was second in command and consigliere to the Chief Executive. He was deeply involved in EdBuild’s state engagement work, leading government and advocate consulting efforts to reform education funding state-by-state. He also provided solicited (and unsolicited) guidance on the production of research reports and associated data analyses.

Zahava Stadler

Managing Director

Zahava led policy research and analysis at EdBuild. She came to EdBuild after completing masters degrees in public administration and education policy. Her prior work focused on the human capital needs of high-need schools and districts, primarily through projects implemented as part of Race to the Top. At EdBuild, she participated in the production of a number of reports and research products, and led the study of state school funding formulas, resulting in the fifty-state formula database FundEd and a detailed set of model funding formula policies, presented in the report Common Sense and Fairness and the interactive web tool EdBuilder.

Notable Former Staff

In addition to the staff that stayed with EdBuild through closure, there are former colleagues that made notable contributions to the organization. We’d like to recognize and appreciate the hard work and dedication of the following individuals:

Other individuals that were not on staff contributed significantly to EdBuild’s work and mission including Sean Gill, Charity Hallman, Christopher Gian, Ethan Lin, Holly Mourges, Cole Buerger, Adam Hewit, Brian Kisida and last, but certainly not least, Eric Lerum.