Each year, the SchoolCEO Excellence in School Marketing Award spotlights K-12 communications professionals who demonstrate outstanding innovation, dedication and thoughtfulness in their work. The truth is that these traits are fairly common among this year’s nominees—so it was with some difficulty that we eventually narrowed the list down to a select few finalists. However, these finalists distinguished themselves by going even further above and beyond in their pursuit of excellence. Once you get to know them a little better, we think you’ll agree. 

But before we unveil our finalists and announce our winner, we’d like to thank every nominator and nominee who shared their time with us during the selection process. Your excellence inspires the SchoolCEO team to do our best work, to serve as a valuable resource to you, to accurately reflect your experiences and to champion your successes—just as you champion the schools you represent.

With that said, it’s now our privilege to introduce our 2025 SchoolCEO Excellence in School Marketing Award finalists! Keep reading to find out more about the impactful work they’re doing to advance the field of school marketing.

Grace Becker, APR, attended private school from kindergarten all the way through twelfth grade—and she says it’s that experience that made her a public school marketer. “I think there were a lot of things that public school would have given me, but that was not the choice my parents made,” she says. “So I understood from a very young age that schools had to articulate what really set them apart and what made them excellent educational choices.” 

Becker graduated college and took her first role in school comms at Minnesota’s Osseo Area Schools at a moment of great upheaval for K-12 education—July 2020. The pandemic was pushing even seasoned comms professionals to their breaking points. The same year, the murder of George Floyd in nearby Minneapolis sparked a national reckoning with systemic racism that begged public institutions to reflect on and acknowledge their parts in an unfair system. 

But instead of shrinking from these challenges as a newcomer to the field, Becker faced them head-on. She became a founding member of the Minnesota School Public Relations Association’s “Good Trouble PR” effort—a call for communicators to practice and promote anti-racism in schools. In addition to contributing to “Good Trouble” professional development opportunities, she was one of a handful of MinnSPRA members who collaborated to write the inaugural Good Trouble PR statement in 2021, which reads in part: “Where we see systemic inequity or racial injustice, we will continuously strive to get in good, necessary trouble.”

Since joining Eden Prairie Schools in 2021, Becker continues to let these words guide her work. She led the creation of an “Inclusive Cultural Connections” group for her team, with monthly meetings and assignments designed to help them confront their own prejudices and deepen their understanding of diverse identities. “For example, we’ll ask ourselves: How might folks with autism spectrum disorder who come to our Welcome Center best be served by us? How might that service be different depending on an individual’s identity and lived experience?” Becker explains. 

In their work, she says, her team has to given everyone in Eden Prairie Schools a truly outstanding experience, rivaling any other education option. That’s why, for Becker, marketing isn’t just about logos and color schemes—it’s about creating experiences that bring people together. “A person’s experience with your brand is every single interaction they have with you,” she says. “So we find opportunities for people to come together. Especially in such a diverse community, I think that’s really key.” 

Last year, Becker oversaw the execution of a yearlong campaign celebrating the district’s 100th anniversary, “100 Years of Inspiring Each,” with the goal of elevating the district’s reputation among staff and the community. In particular, the campaign hoped to reach residents without students in school to foster ongoing pride and support. As part of that campaign, they brought people together by holding an adults-only, citywide prom. With the help of the Eden Prairie Historical Society, Becker’s team decorated the district’s Historic Gym with displays of vintage photographs and letterman jackets evoking past proms. Guests dressed in the style of clothing they wore to their own high school dances while an alumni band played classic hits. The local Lions Club served drinks at the event, local restaurants donated food, and at the end of the night, a citywide prom king and queen were crowned. “It was a lot of work, but it exemplified what our district is about: legacy and community. That really was the gem of that whole celebration—the collaboration and partnerships with city folks and the Eden Prairie Historical Society,” Becker says. 

But that was just one of a series of events spanning the centennial year, which culminated with the “Citywide Celebration: Stadium Parade and GIVE Gathering.” Community members of all ages were invited to watch students from each Eden Prairie school walk in a celebratory parade as district history was read. Then more than 15 civic partners offered resources to the attendees. 

Overall, “100 Years of Inspiring Each”—which won a Gold Medallion award from the National School Public Relations Association in 2025—made a measurable impact on the district’s standing in the greater community. In a third-party survey, 37% of event participants felt the district’s reputation had improved compared to the prior year, 32% reported increased pride in the district, and 20% felt more connected to Eden Prairie Schools. Most remarkably, the campaign generated more than $335,000 in profit for the district thanks to donations and increased student retention.

Becker’s dedication to creating a top-notch experience for every stakeholder goes beyond citywide celebrations, though. She also overhauled the district’s kindergarten enrollment efforts, which had previously been a series of uninspired, repetitive events seeing declining attendance. The new “Kindergarten Adventure Day” invites families considering Eden Prairie Schools to ride the bus to campus, visit a real classroom and join current students for lunch and recess. “Kinder KidFlick” welcomes prospective students to school to watch a movie in their pajamas, freeing up their families to speak one-on-one with teachers and principals at the event. And “KinderCamp” gives incoming students two half-days at school to get comfortable with their new environment before the academic year begins. 

The results of the reimagined kindergarten enrollment campaign were measurable: Event attendance grew by 30% on average, with some individual events seeing 300% increases. More importantly, the district hit its enrollment goals for the 2024-25 school year—and will set a 10-year enrollment record in 2025-26.

Becker also improved Eden Prairie High School’s graduation ceremony to ensure it provided the inclusive, professional experience families had come to expect. To make the event both special and accessible, she brought in interpreters for attendees and designed translated programs with an elevated look and feel for families to have as keepsakes. And when one high school junior passed away, Becker arranged for an honorary diploma to be awarded to the student the following year and printed personalized programs as mementos for the grieving family. “It does matter—putting that extra little touch on something that makes a person look at us and go, ‘Wow, I wouldn’t have expected that of a public school,’” says Becker. “That is a reputation shift that we need to make. We need to prove why a family should choose us every single day.” 

“Opportunities to bring stakeholders together and give them high-quality experiences that demonstrate care and connection are powerful marketing moments,” Becker says. They certainly have been for Eden Prairie Schools. In an era when public education faces unprecedented challenges, her focus on elevating in-person experiences has actually moved the needle on enrollment, generated revenue for the district and increased the community’s support for its schools. Powerful, indeed. 

When a new superintendent joined New York’s Lockport City School District (LCSD) in 2023, Communication Specialist Bridget Licata was excited to work with a leader who shared her passion for unity and inclusion. However, a series of unfortunate events prior to his arrival had eroded some of the community’s trust in the district. So he asked Licata to help rebrand the district as a welcoming environment for all students and families. 

Licata came up with the slogan “We All Belong,” a statement that beautifully captures that spirit of inclusivity they wanted to cultivate at the district. Later that same year, Denyel Beiter joined the district as public relations specialist to help drive student, staff and community engagement. Together, the duo has brought “We All Belong” to life in Lockport.

First, Licata and Beiter integrated the “We All Belong” slogan across all district communications and printed it on T-shirts they handed out to every staff member. And Licata, a big Taylor Swift fan, adopted the singer’s heart hand gesture as a visual representation of the district’s new motto. “At every event where we had large groups of kids, we would take pictures doing the hand heart,” she says. “Three years later, they see us and they make the heart, whether we have a camera or not.” Over time, it has become an organic symbol of the district, with students using the gesture in photos and videos they post of themselves on social media. 

But “We All Belong” was more than a slogan—it was a commitment to stakeholders. So the duo, both Lockport alums, set about launching a series of events that would engage the whole community and widen the circle of belonging. For example, they transformed a small middle school celebration of diversity and belonging to a much bigger, communitywide event called Unity Fest. Held on their varsity soccer field, this year’s event had multiple activity zones. One zone, the “Walk Around the World” section, comprised more than 50 booths circling the track, “not just celebrating cultures, but also celebrating subcultures—who our people are,” says Beiter. “This year, we really focused on the LGBTQ population, veterans and students with special needs. We had polka music and African hair braiding booths. Classically trained ballerinas and robotics teams did demonstrations. There was even a silent disco for kids who like music and dancing. So it really was all-encompassing—everyone coming together, teaching each other and learning from each other.” 

This year’s event began with a flag football clinic for kindergarteners led by varsity players. Professional musicians performed on a stage as people browsed the booths. And the half-day event culminated in a pep rally for participants in Rachel’s Challenge, a national school violence prevention initiative designed to encourage and celebrate acts of kindness. “Any time students see or perform an act of kindness, someone writes it on a piece of paper that’s folded into a link,” Licata explains. “For the entire school year, all eight schools are making these chain links. At Unity Fest, we bring them all together, and the chain goes around the entire varsity soccer field.” Students from each school ran the field, cheered on by varsity and JV cheerleaders. The high school marching band was also on hand, hyping the crowd with contemporary hits by artists like Chappell Roan.  

In Beiter and Licata’s hands, a tiny middle school event became a communitywide festival that drew over 2,000 attendees in its first year and over 3,000 this year. But in addition to maximizing Unity Fest, the dynamo team also created an event to celebrate Women’s History Month that would once again engage the entire Lockport community. “We wanted to be champions of the district, but also champions of Lockport itself. If we want to make the world a better place, that has to start with our hometown,” says Beiter. The result was “Women Who ROAR (Recognizing Outstanding Achievements and Resilience),” a yearly luncheon and award ceremony to honor community members and students—so named as a nod to the district’s mascot, the Lions. 

The first year, the duo worked closely with district leadership to identify women in the community to recognize—women who would inspire their students. Awardees included a civil engineer, a local television broadcaster and a registered nurse with a deep commitment to educating and mentoring fellow nurses. The second year, they opened the selection process to the public, and the nominations rolled in. 

On the student side, teachers and principals were asked to nominate pupils. “We weren’t necessarily looking for the top athletic student, the top student in academics. We were looking for someone who maybe doesn’t get recognized, but whose character makes them really stand out,” Licata says. “I think the principals really understood that and chose accordingly.” One such winner was a high school student with a passion for theatre and dance. She was so passionate about performing arts that in fact, in the 10th grade, she performed a major role in the school play while undergoing chemotherapy for brain cancer. 

This year, Women Who ROAR welcomed 125 people to a luncheon for nominees and over 400 people to the awards ceremony. Events like these are helping the LCSD brand turn a corner with the community. “Social media was a problem three to four years ago,” says Beiter. “But the board is seeing it fade out. There are lots of people defending us now.”

“We All Belong” is more than just a slogan at Lockport; it’s a guiding principle that has permeated the school community. A story from a recent “Lion Bytes” newsletter confirms this. At a local skatepark, an LCSD high school student noticed another boy admiring his scooter, so he gave the other boy a turn on it—then gave it to him to keep. 

Like the participants in Rachel’s Challenge, that student is representative of the type of Lion our finalists celebrate at Lockport—a Lion who demonstrates kindness and strength of character. With Beiter and Licata at the district’s marketing helm, everyone at LCSD, regardless of academic success or athletic ability, is made to feel a part of their pride.

For Dr. Christopher Villarreal, school communications is the perfect meeting point of two passions. By the time he joined the field, he had already spent more than a decade in public schools, starting as a high school English Language Arts teacher and later working in curriculum and instruction at the district level. “But before I was a teacher, I worked in marketing and design for an outdoor adventure company,” Villarreal tells SchoolCEO. “So when Spring Hill Schools in Kansas was looking for a new communications director, I had the opportunity to meld those two worlds together.” 

After two and a half successful years at Spring Hill, Villarreal moved into his current role as the director of communications for Nebraska’s Papillion La Vista Community Schools (PLCS). Now entering his fifth year in school comms, he has learned just how much the work can change from one district to another. “I had the same role before, but I’m not doing the same job, because the needs are different from one district to the next,” he says. “So digging my claws in and figuring out what the needs are here has made a big difference in the work that I’m doing.” 

Throughout his work at both districts, Villarreal’s ability to turn seemingly routine information into engaging stories has set him apart. For example, when his school board at Spring Hill requested a monthly update on their schools, he created “What’s Going Well,” a series of short videos highlighting the happenings in each building. “We had realized the power that video had for our stakeholders,” he says. “So we picked one school each month and went out on a random day to walk the halls and ask people what was going well.” By taking this dynamic approach, Villarreal did more than deliver information; he offered board members a window into Spring Hill’s school buildings. The videos were released publicly as well—so what started as an internal update became an outward-facing tool for celebrating school success in the community. 

Villarreal’s talent for putting a fresh spin on familiar communications continues at PLCS with the “Greatness Update” magazine—his twist on a traditional annual report. “One of the questions that comes up often for us is: How do we make sure that community members who are not parents of school-age children still feel connected to what’s going on in the district?” he says. Villarreal realized the district’s annual report—which was already landing in every mailbox in the community—could help build that connection. 

The award-winning “Greatness Update” magazine—deriving its name from the PLCS tagline, “Be known for greatness”—delivers the same facts and figures as a traditional annual report, but in a format that stakeholders actually want to read. “We tried to make sure that we were connecting the data to a story, because the best way to understand data is to understand the story behind it,” he says. For example, instead of simply listing PLCS’ eight college and career academies, Villarreal and his team interviewed Emmanuella, a high school senior interning in a preschool classroom through the district’s teacher education academy. And this story, like all the others in the issue, is accompanied by eye-catching photos. 

“We were really happy with the response,” says Villarreal. “Anecdotally, we heard that neighbors were talking to our families about the magazine. That helped us to see that this actually was going to catch more attention than your traditional annual report.” To build on that momentum, Villarreal and his team plan to send out three issues of the magazine in the 2025-26 school year. “The January issue will still have all that required annual report information in it,” he explains, “but the other two are just going to be pieces to help our community connect with what’s going on in our schools.”

A key counterbalance to Villarreal’s outside-the-box approach to communication is his reliance on data to drive strategy. “I love analytics,” he tells SchoolCEO. “I just onboarded a new person to my team who said to me, unprompted, ‘I love how you guys use data to drive what you’re doing, not just how people are feeling.’ And that is 100% correct.”

That reliance on data began at Spring Hill, where Villarreal and his team used analytics from the district’s AlwaysOn chatbot to guide their marketing efforts. “Using those monthly analytics and starting to understand the ebb and flow of information really helped us know what people were searching for and when,” he says. 

For example, AlwaysOn data showed that people tended to ask the Spring Hill chatbot about back-to-school information, like registration and classroom supply lists, in July. Armed with that information, Villarreal and his team could start proactively addressing those questions in their marketing in June. “It’s kind of like how algorithms work: They recognize patterns and then use them as predictors for behavior,” Villarreal explains. “That’s what we started doing. We used the questions that people submitted through AlwaysOn to predict what behavior would come up throughout the school year, then catered our marketing efforts to that behavior.”

Now, at PLCS, Villarreal continues to use data to give stakeholders the info they’re looking for. “I work with our superintendent on a biweekly newsletter,” he says. “So a while ago, we asked the community: What do you want to hear more about from your superintendent?” Survey results showed that community members were interested in relevant legislation, the district budget, and progress updates on projects from the district’s 2023 bond. 

“So when we developed the new template for his newsletter, we made a section for each of those items,” says Villarreal. “Every two weeks, we tell them what he’s doing related to those different pieces—because we know that’s what they want to hear about.” And, thanks to more data, Villarreal can be sure that approach has worked. “In our most recent survey, people in our community said that the newsletter was their number-one source of information for the school district,” he says.

An educator at heart, Villarreal has never forgotten what this work is truly about: students. “I care a lot about helping to develop students and doing the best we can to serve them,” he says. “That’s why I went into education in the first place and why I’m still in education now.” For him, school communications is more than a job; as he puts it, “It’s what I live. It’s who I am.” 

A passionate advocate for public education, Craig Maniglia is making significant gains for Florida’s Sarasota County Schools (SCS) by drawing on his background in the private sector. Before becoming the district’s director of communications and government affairs, Maniglia was the chief operating officer of a production and public relations company in Washington, D.C. “I have a lot of experience across different platforms in communications,” he tells us, “from network television to creative direction to crisis management. I was instrumental in launching the Discovery and National Geographic networks during my days in D.C.—and if I didn’t have that bucket to draw from now that I’m in this role, it would be extremely hard.” 

According to Maniglia, the world of school communications is no longer as simple as sending out a press release. It’s becoming an increasingly complex and fast-paced field that now requires a highly diverse skill set—one we believe he has mastered.

Being the Best

“My first week here in Sarasota, I had someone tell me that I had to slow down. They said I was going to raise the bar too high for the district to ever achieve the goals I set,” Maniglia tells us. “But I actually want to set a bar that we’ll never reach, and I want to raise that bar higher every year. I don’t believe in maintaining the status quo; I believe in always doing better.”

Everything Maniglia does is rooted in a fundamental goal that most educators share: doing right by students. “Every student deserves a free public education at its highest degree,” he tells us. “Your economic circumstances or where you’re from shouldn’t determine the quality of your education. I believe strongly in choice—so our job is to make sure public school is the best choice. I want families to choose Sarasota County Schools because we’re the best, not because we’re the only option.”  

And since Maniglia transitioned to school communications a decade ago, he’s had success in pushing SCS to be a district of choice. From increasing enrollment to working with other districts to get a proposed budget solution passed by Florida’s legislature, Maniglia isn’t afraid to set ambitious goals. 

Thinking Like a Marketer

Throughout his career in both the public and private sectors, Maniglia has cultivated a sophisticated marketing philosophy informed by time-tested strategies. Here are just a few he’s employed to elevate SCS as a district of choice. 

Subliminal Messaging

We don’t have to tell you that conversations about education are rife with misinformation. When it comes to correcting it, though, a common pitfall is restating the false claim. For example, maybe there’s a rumor that district leadership is using tax dollars to disproportionately fund sports. In response, you might say, “Our district does not care more about sports than academics”—but by giving the false claim more airtime, you run the risk of solidifying it in your audience’s minds. That’s because the more we hear something, the more likely we are to remember it. 

When it comes to correcting falsehoods, sometimes it’s better to show rather than tell—and that’s exactly what Maniglia does. Instead of explicitly engaging in a dialogue about misinformation, he subtly shows what’s really going on. Say he’s working on a video about district culture. “If someone is saying we’re an unsafe campus, I’ll show people walking through metal detectors. If I hear that the school resource officers are unfriendly, I’ll show them on the playground throwing a football with the kids,” he says. The video isn’t really about either of those things, but including those images subliminally corrects the misinformation in community members’ minds. “It doesn’t necessarily need to be in the foreground,” Maniglia says. “I tell the story in the background.”

Saturation

As we already established, the more an audience is exposed to something, the more likely they are to remember it. Such is the case with claims—true or false—and such is the case with your brand. “If you see something once, maybe you remember it. If you see it twice, maybe you think you know about it,” says Maniglia. “When you start to see it five or six times in different contexts—on TV, at the bus stop, in the mall, on social media—you start to assume it’s good or desirable.” 

So when the district ran its enrollment campaign early in 2025, Maniglia’s goal was to get the district’s name in front of as many people as possible. “We had podcasts, informational videos and banners that said ‘Choose Sarasota,’” Maniglia says. “We even had television commercials driving people to our website.” In fact, part of what made this campaign so special was that the district had never before used television marketing to increase student enrollment—even though it had once been Maniglia’s bread and butter. 

He explains that while TV marketing may sound intimidating, it’s actually relatively accessible for school leaders. With a small budget and the right streaming partner, you can get real bang for your buck by geofencing your ads according to your target audience. “It could cost you less than a penny to put your message in front of someone who is interested,” he tells us. 

“So we saturated the market with these ads,” Maniglia says. “And we achieved an impressive 98% completion rate—meaning almost everyone who started watching the ad stayed through to the very end. In television marketing, keeping an audience engaged is everything. Holding attention on a two-and-a-half-minute video about a math teacher is like throwing a Hail Mary in the final seconds of the Super Bowl. It’s that tough, but when caught, it changes the outcome.”

Maniglia’s strategy of increasing visibility worked. On the very first day the district’s enrollment application opened, SCS had 813 applications—a 26% increase over the prior year.

Fishing Where the Fish Are

Every school leader has heard this old marketing adage: “Meet your audience where they are.” Like many cliches, it’s so often repeated because it’s deeply true. Maniglia’s answer to this charge is similar to the strategy he used to increase the district’s enrollment numbers: communicating often and through a variety of channels.

“We branded everything to InForm, InSight, In Touch, and In Tune,” Maniglia explains. That’s the terminology the district uses to refer to their primary communication channels. “InForm Community Clarity” is a landing page on the district’s site that provides “clarifications on recent news coverage, factual responses to public questions or rumors spreading on social media, and supporting data and documents for full transparency.” It is, as the page’s subheading explains, “the full picture behind the headlines.” 

InForm is just one of the district’s strategies for keeping their community in the know. SCS also holds InSight Community Connection events, opportunities for stakeholders to engage in casual conversation with Superintendent Terry Connor. “He sits there in his polo shirt with no desk or microphone, and anybody is welcome to come,” Maniglia explains. 

The In Touch newsletter has also become a great avenue for SCS to engage with stakeholders who lack direct connections to the district. “There are 45,000 people in our school community that we can send our newsletter to,” Maniglia says, “But now we have well over 65,000 people subscribed.” What’s more, the newsletter has become a source of revenue. By selling advertising space, Maniglia and his team are generating marketing dollars that can go toward future projects.

And finally, there’s In Tune, the district’s podcast. Episodes cover topics relevant to K-12 families—like school choice, safety or mental health—and are available in multiple languages. “It’s just another way to reach people and reinforce our messaging,” Maniglia says. “You have to fish where the fish are. Don’t throw your line into the swimming pool; there aren’t any fish there. Make sure that when you’re communicating, you’re doing it with intentionality.”

Working Together

In a world built on competition, it can be tempting to keep our best ideas to ourselves. After all, when funding is by no means a given, maybe an “every school for itself” approach is the best method for guarding our students’ futures. Right?

Wrong—at least according to Maniglia. “Everything that I do is available for anybody to have,” he tells SchoolCEO. “We don’t hold it back. I truly believe we’re better together.” 

Maniglia isn’t just SCS’ director of communications; he’s also the district’s director of government affairs. As such, he is very aware of Florida’s educational policy proceedings. Recently, during their budget cycle, the legislature proposed a change that would have cut 50% of funding for certain public school programs, such as Advanced Placement and dual enrollment courses. “They just didn’t realize what that change would really mean,” Maniglia explains. 

Working with their lobbyist and legislators in Sarasota, Maniglia and SCS Supervisor of Government Affairs Chris Parenteau developed a one-sheeter proposing a solution. “We shared it with more than 10 other school districts, who then repurposed the content with their own branding,” he says. “From there, those districts passed it along to even more districts across the state. As a result, the proposal to reduce the funding was rescinded and funding levels maintained. It just goes to show: There’s power in numbers.”

And that belief in collaboration extends to the very heart of Maniglia’s leadership style. “What I’ve learned is that my way isn’t the only way. It’s just a way. It’s so important to let the people around you fly, to mentor them, let them expand and explore, so that they can eventually become you,” he tells SchoolCEO. 

It’s that collaborative spirit, that willingness to elevate the people around him, that makes Maniglia so good at what he does. Yes, he may be a master of marketing, but his real superpower is his belief in other people, how they can band together to make a difference. “The people around you are who make you,” Maniglia tells us. And that mindset is exactly why he sets the bar so high for himself and his team: because he believes his district deserves the best. For them—for the students, families, staff and every member of the SCS community—Maniglia and his team will always work to exceed expectations.