In September, EOS announced our inaugural class of Opportunity Champions, who are recognized for doing exceptional work in transforming their school or district’s advanced academic pathways.
This month, we are highlighting Kim Becraft, Middle Years Program Coordinator at Seneca Valley High School in Montgomery County Public Schools, Maryland.

“Kim is absolutely invigorated by this work,” said EOS Partnership Director Erika Cabrera, who nominated Becraft for this distinction. “Kim shares ALL information EOS shares with her with her entire school, really driving school-wide efforts to increase access, reduce biases and stigmas, and sustain successful classrooms.
Last year, Becraft led her team in adding 249 students to AP/IB classes, a 19% increase from the year prior. Given this impressive increase, Becraft’s goal was to sustain this gain. She ended up surpassing that goal by enrolling an additional 49 students (a 3% gain) into AP/IB courses. This brings Seneca Valley’s population of low-income/BIPOC students enrolled in AP/IB to 66%.

We asked Becraft about the mission behind her work, and the factors that contributed to her team’s accomplishment of their goals.
What drives you to continue to do the work of creating access and opportunity in your district?
My driver is always the students- ensuring they have the information, sense of belonging, confidence, and support to succeed in higher level classes.
What has been your favorite part of the work this year?
My favorite part of this work is when alumni come back to visit and share stories of their preparedness and success after high school.
How has EOS served as an essential support to student success?
The EOS survey data is essential to guiding our work to ensure effective action items, elevating the importance of the work with staff, and allowing us to drill down to focus sets of students. Our EOS liaison, Erica, has also been fantastic is helping us brainstorm, provide quick responses to requests or needed clarifications, and helping us to maximize our use of the EOS data. I also really enjoyed the workshops facilitated by Erika – they provided helpful mini-professional development and allowed us to share best practices with other schools.
Tell us about a time when you witnessed the impact of the EOS work on you, your colleagues or your students?
My school created a professional development workshop where we used the EOS data portal to create a list of students who did not identify a trusted adult in the building. In a gallery walk format, staff reviewed the students, adding what they knew personally about each student. We then took the list of students and analyzed the demographic data to see larger trends about who did not identify a trusted adult in our building (males, 9th graders, etc.). Staff finished the training by reflecting on how they could collect voice data from students without a trusted adult in order to develop classroom-based goals and action items based on the data. Using both the larger data trends and individual student list was impactful.
For students, we held an AP & IB Teacher meet and greet during lunch at the end of the year. The students who attending completed a short survey on the event. It was such a joy to see their excitement about higher level classes and to review the results on the feedback survey. We created a word cloud based on student responses to the question – “In one word, how are you feeling about your AP and/or IB classes next year?”. It was awesome to hear that our students were both nervous AND excited!