Jennifer Rippner serves as a senior policy advisor for EducationCounsel LLC, in affiliation with Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough. She has considerable experience in education issues from both the school administration and state government policy levels.

Before joining the Firm, she served as executive director for the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement, where she reported directly to the governor on preK through higher education accountability data. Ms. Rippner also served as an education policy advisor to Governor Sonny Perdue. In that capacity, she was responsible for developing and implementing statewide education programs, communicating Governor Perdue’s policies and accountability philosophy, and worked with legislators, educational leaders, and teachers. Before that, she was program manager for Charter Schools and Alternative Education at the Georgia Department of Education.

She is a former director of the Charter School Accountability Center at Florida State University’s College of Education, a center she opened and directed with a Florida Department of Education grant. Before that she was school director of Micanopy Area Cooperative School, a charter school in Micanopy, Fla. She also has worked as a teaching assistant.

She currently serves by Gov. Perdue’s appointment as a board member of the Southern Regional Education Board. She also is one of 15 selected worldwide as a Global Policy Fellow by the Institute for Higher Education Policy for a two-year fellowship studying higher education access issues. The program is supported by the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. She was a member of the Georgia Alliance of Education Agency Heads and a former board member of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers.

Highlights of her other professional achievements include:

• She proposed, developed, and implemented a new P-16 structure for Georgia -- the Alliance of Education Agency Heads. This moved the accountability for seamless matriculation of students to the agency heads and organized the deputies of all agencies as the implementation team. The Governor’s Office of Planning and Budget has now adopted this as a required model for all state government clusters: Health, Economic Development, and Public Safety.
• She directed the Charter School Accountability Center at Florida State University, which increased to encompass the following additional grants after its first year: Voluntary Public School Choice Grant and the Parental Satisfaction Survey. Total funding increased from $366,000 in 2002 to $715,000 in 2003.
• She was named one of Georgia Trend magazine’s 2006 “40 Under 40 Rising Stars to Watch” in Georgia.

She earned her Juris Doctor in 2000 from the University of Florida Levin College of Law. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of Florida in the honors program in 1997. She currently is pursuing a Ph.D. in Higher Education from the University of Georgia Institute of Higher Education.