Melissa Simon Bortner
Melissa Simon Bortner joined The K12 Search Group in late 2017. She is a seasoned human capital leader focused on cultivating talented people to positively impact the professionals they work with and organizations they work for. Prior to joining The K12 Search Group, Melissa was National Director of Talent at Educators for Excellence. At E4E, Melissa led the organization’s talent work and grew the number of full-time employees by over 300%. She created and scaled all human-capital systems and recruited, developed, and managed a full-time talent team. Before Educators for Excellence, Melissa worked in fundraising and recruitment for Teach For America, managing, coaching, and leading teams of development and recruitment professionals for over five years. As a recruiter and manager of a recruitment team at Teach For America, Melissa recruited over 700 corps members--leading the country with her results.
Prior to entering the world of nonprofit management, Melissa was a Teach For America corps member. She taught middle school ESL and history in South Central Los Angeles, where she led her students to achieve an average of 2.2 years of reading growth and over 80% content mastery in history each year. Melissa was a national semi-finalist for the Sue Lehmann Excellence in Teaching award.
Melissa holds a Master’s in Elementary Education from Loyola Marymount University as well as a Bachelor’s degree in Urban History and Immigration from the University of California Berkeley (Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa). She and her husband, Matt, live in Oceanside, CA and recently welcomed their first child.