IN FOCUS MEMBER Calli Coleman

Calli Coleman

She’s an expert at learning on the fly

By Nicole Krueger

After her 14th tax season in public accounting, Calli Coleman felt burned out. She wanted to do something different.

When she accepted a job with the Shasta County Office of Education three years ago, she got a bit more than she’d bargained for.

Her first day on the job, she learned that instead of working for the general business department, she’d be doing accounting and data management for the county’s Special Education Local Plan Area (SELPA), which distributes funding to ensure all students in the county get equitable service for special education.

“I didn’t know what SELPA meant. I had to get a crash course from my predecessor,” she says. “I found out my job also consisted of data management, and I didn’t know what that meant either.”

On top of all that, she began work just as the California Department of Education was transitioning to a new data management software platform and hiring an influx of new data managers. While still learning how to do her own job, Coleman suddenly found herself fielding questions from people in 30 different districts.

“I was pretty new at it too, and I was answering the same question 30 times,” she says. “Then the pandemic started, and some people were working from home, some alone in their offices with masks on and their doors closed. Everyone was in their own separate bubble. We have this amazing network of 70 data people across the county, and none were talking to each other, but they were all calling me with the same questions.”

Her solution was to start running a monthly Zoom meeting where special education data managers could share information and get their questions answered – once again stepping out of her depth and venturing into entirely new territory.

“I was doing it by the seat of my pants,” she admits. Undaunted, she took an online course to become a Google Certified Educator and carried on.

Coleman credits her ability to learn on the fly to a concept she discovered while studying business at Simpson University: continuous improvement. In manufacturing, managers constantly look for ways to remove bottlenecks and make their operations as efficient as possible.

“I really grabbed onto that concept. I’ve always tried to make sure there’s some kind of improvement happening in my life,” says Coleman, who recently earned an MBA from Trevecca Nazarene University and applied for CBO Certification. She adds that much of her motivation comes from her two teenage sons. “I really want to show them that my hard work pays off and that a good work ethic is really valuable.”

A former munitions systems journeyman in the U.S. Air Force, Coleman is no stranger to tackling new challenges. During her time in the military, she spent three years in Okinawa, Japan, and was deployed in Saudi Arabia after 9/11 – an experience she describes as both terrifying and enlightening.

Today, in addition to her monthly SELPA data manager meetings, Coleman runs a statewide virtual roundtable for special education accountants through CASBO, and recently started a similar roundtable for special education data managers throughout the state.

With only 130 SELPAs in the state, “it’s really hard to find people who know what you do and can answer your questions,” says the CASBO Special Education Professional Council member.

“It’s an opportunity for all these really amazing, smart, experienced people to share their knowledge at a state level, while also providing this sense of camaraderie so they’re not feeling hopeless, alone and overwhelmed.” z z z

Photography by Marian Morgan-Hunt