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KIPP Aspire Academy Board of Trustees

Michele Authenrieth Brown, Chairperson of Board

Michele is a former broadcast journalist who has worked in media, marketing and advertising for more than half her life. At the age of sixteen, Michele began working in radio and continued during college, both on-air and in music programming. After attending the University of Texas at San Antonio, she spent five years as a reporter, assignments editor and morning news producer at KENS-TV (CBS affiliate) in San Antonio. From there, she moved to public relations where she worked at a firm for three years handling news media for a national home improvement chain.  Michele has spent the last 12 years with Guerra DeBerry Coody (GDC), a marketing communications firm in San Antonio. During her time at GDC, Michele’s multi-field experience has allowed her to develop innovative marketing solutions for clients like Procter & Gamble, Citibank, Sprint PCS, Time Warner Cable and more. Michele has a passion for volunteering and spent ten years as the marketing/PR chair for the Komen San Antonio Race for the Cure® which started in 1997 as an 800 person walk and grew to a 30,000 person competitive run/walk in 2007 raising more than $1.5 million annually for the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation.  Michele is married to Will Brown, a hospital administrator and has two small children, Noah and Macey.

Vanessa Lacoss Hurd, Secretary

As Partner for The New Teacher Project’s Training and Certification line, Vanessa Lacoss Hurd is responsible for the expansion, implementation and continuing evolution of TNTP’s teacher certification projects, including the Louisiana Practitioner Teacher Program, Texas Teaching Fellows and the Maryland Practitioner Teacher Program. Prior to joining TNTP, Vanessa served as Vice President of Strategic Initiatives and Development for Jumpstart, where she developed a new budgeting and cost-allocation system, managed the start-up of two of the organization’s five regions, and launched a pilot initiative to expand Jumpstart in partnership with another national nonprofit organization. In addition, Vanessa served as Executive Director for Teach For America in Houston, TX for four years and spent three years as a teacher, two of them in Houston as a Teach For America corps member. She holds a Master’s degree in public policy from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and a BA in History and Economics from the University of Pennsylvania.

George Karutz, Jr., Treasurer

George Karutz, Jr.  Founder of Sendero Advisors, LLC.  Throughout his career, Mr. Karutz has advised CEOs and other executives from Fortune 100 companies, middle market companies, and start-up ventures on financial, strategic, and operational matters.  At The Boston Consulting Group, Mr. Karutz advised companies on developing strategic plans necessary to realize company objectives for acquisitions, divestitures, and organic growth.  Mr. Karutz assisted companies through business turnaround and bankruptcy situations while at Price Waterhouse.  Mr. Karutz has experience advising clients in a broad range of industries including energy, technology, financial services, retail, durable goods, real estate and industrial services.

Paul Sexton, Jr.
After completing his education through Vanderbilt University and the University of Houston Law School, Mr. Sexton joined the law firm of Fulbright & Jaworski L.L.P. He and a partner opened the San Antonio office of Fulbright and Jaworski seventeen years ago, building it into one of the industry leaders in San Antonio. He continues to serve as a Partner and specializes in Labor Law. Mr. Sexton recently completed two terms on the board of the Special Olympics of Texas as an exemplary board member and is committed to his service on the board of KIPP Aspire Academy.

Rashmita Willis
Rashmita Willis is the Senior Director of the Service Quality and Client Escalations utility for Citigroup’s Retail Banking Operation in San Antonio, Texas. In this capacity, Rashmita is responsible for the daily operations management of the Citibank Client Services Client Escalations function in San Antonio, Florence and Tampa, handling over 150,000 critical client service recovery transactions per month. In addition, she is responsible for the direction, design, development and execution of all customer experience programs for the Citibank Client Services organization, and its’ respective support functions, to include end to end integration and linkages with all Citibank North America Financial Centers, Operations and Technology groups, and Citibank Global Consumer Group initiatives, processes, and channels. Rashmita joined the Citibank family in 1993. Since then she has performed in various functional roles to include Operations, Service Quality and Re-engineering. Prior to her current position, Rashmita was the National Telesales Inbound Sales Director. Rashmita was born in Kenya, Africa but was raised in England where she completed her education majoring in Economics and Pure Mathematics with Statistics. An avid athlete, Rashmita played field hockey at very high levels for many years, where she was the West Midlands County team captain for both the outdoor and indoor Hockey teams. Although, the majority of her life was spent in England, Rashmita has lived in the United States for the last 17 years, obtaining her American Citizenship in the year 2000. Rashmita resides in San Antonio with her husband Timothy, and her 16-year-old daughter Nakhila, who is currently a student at Keystone School.