Kim Frusciante
Founder & Executive Director
Kim Frusciante is the Founder and Executive Director of Early Partners, bringing nearly 20 years of experience in education and 15 years of leadership experience. She is deeply passionate about leveraging early childhood brain development to create better outcomes for children and foster a more equitable future for New Orleans.
Kim began her career teaching high school Social Studies in Dallas before returning to New Orleans in 2010 to teach at the flagship school of Collegiate Academies (CA). As a key leader in the network’s first expansion school and later at the network level, she gained valuable experience in school startups, scaling instructional models, systems development, data-driven instruction, leading teams through growth phases, and talent recruitment and development. While supporting schools, Kim became increasingly concerned about the lack of high school readiness among students entering 9th grade, many reading at a 3rd-grade level. After becoming a parent and learning about the significance of early childhood brain development, she shifted her focus to early childhood education. This journey gave her a unique perspective on the full arc of a child’s education, significantly shaping her approach to Early Partners.
Early Partners was incubated while Kim earned her Master's in Educational Leadership from the Harvard Graduate School of Education (GSE), where she graduated with top honors, serving as Class Marshal for the School Leadership Program and delivering the Student Convocation Speech for the entire GSE. Kim tailored her Harvard coursework to inform every aspect of Early Partners, from micro-level literacy programming to long-term strategies for scaling impact. Harvard remains a key partner for Early Partners, and in March 2023, Kim and two members of her leadership team attended the “Scaling for Impact” workshop led by Dr. Monica Higgins at Harvard GSE. Early Partners is also working with a Harvard GSE researcher on Project Bridge, a study examining how the Reggio-inspired curriculum and data-driven instruction intersect to support school readiness.
Kim lives in New Orleans with her husband, Taylor Gilbert, and their two children, Edith (9) and Andy (6). Edith was part of Early Partners’ initial pilots, funded by 4.0 Schools, and Andy attended Early Partners from 2021 to 2023.