Mary Kingston Roche comes to Penn Hill Group with nearly 20 years of experience in education and almost 15 years in legislative policy and advocacy from the Federal to local levels. Kingston Roche brings expertise in K-12 Federal education policy and in leading advocacy campaigns to secure increased funding and policy goals. As a Senior Director at Penn Hill Group, Kingston Roche also leads the policy and advocacy of the Knowledge Alliance as Senior Director of Policy.

Prior to joining Penn Hill, Kingston Roche worked for 10 years at the Institute for Educational Leadership (IEL), where she oversaw and grew IEL’s Federal policy portfolio across education and workforce development. While at IEL, she led the advocacy for the Coalition for Community Schools and worked with partners to enshrine the Full-Service Community Schools program in the Every Student Succeeds Act, increase funding for the program from $10 million to $150 million and secure inclusion of a new State grant category to build States’ capacity to implement and scale community schools. Additionally, Kingston Roche launched and facilitated the Community Schools State Coalitions Network, supporting the successful network growth and State policy of approximately 15 States. She has spoken at several national conferences and wrote or contributed to several publications on Community Schools and whole-child school improvement.

Kingston Roche also brings experience in capacity-building and leadership development for policy and advocacy. While at IEL, she served as National Director of the Education Policy Fellowship Program that supported over 200 Fellows nationwide, developed IEL’s Policy by the People modules and co-designed and hosted an annual Federal Policy Institute for Columbia University graduate students.

From 2016-2018, Kingston Roche served as an appointed at-large member on the Board of Education for Prince George’s County Public Schools. On the school board, she led the unanimous passage of a local Community Schools policy that serves over 70 schools in the district today and served as Chair of the Academic Achievement Committee. Earlier, Kingston Roche served as Manager of Government Relations for the National Association of Secondary School Principals, where she worked on Federal legislation and funding to support our nation’s middle and high school principals and their students. Kingston Roche began her career teaching middle and high school English in Oakland, CA.

Kingston Roche graduated from Duke University with a Master of Public Policy and from Boston University with a Bachelor of Arts in English, where she also competed on the women’s track and cross-country teams. She also holds a certification in Design Thinking for Innovation from the University of Virginia. In her free time, she enjoys running, traveling and spending time with family and friends. Across her experiences as a teacher, advocate, policymaker and Mom, Kingston Roche is also passionate about the power of our curiosity and has written and delivered a TEDx talk on this topic.