Kris Amundson served as the president and CEO of the National Association of State Boards of Education from 2013–2019. She led the association through a strategic planning process that focused association resources on the issues of greatest importance to state board of education members.
Amundson represented a part of Northern Virginia in the Virginia General Assembly from 1999–2009. During that time, she was a member of Virginia’s P–16 Council and the Southern Regional Education Board. Before her election to the General Assembly, Amundson, a former teacher, served for nearly a decade on the Fairfax County, Va., School Board, including two years as its chairwoman. She also served as the senior vice president for external affairs at Education Sector, an independent think tank.
She writes frequently on education issues and has been published in The Washington Post and the Richmond Times-Dispatch, among others. She has served as a keynote speaker, a panelist and a panel moderator on a wide range of topics.
In 2017, she was appointed by Gov. Terry McAuliffe to serve as one of Virginia’s commissioners on the Education Commission of the States. Amundson is the co-founder of la BECA Women’s Scholarship Foundation, which has provided support to more than 100 girls and women in Central and South America to pursue their educational dreams. She also co-founded EduTutorVA, which seeks to “directly address the needs of our most vulnerable students and to improve the teacher pipeline from colleges and universities to the classroom.”
Her book, “81 Questions for Parents: Helping Your Kids Succeed in School,” was recently published; it dives into some of the school secrets parents need to know — the often unwritten rules that can make a child’s K-12 experience the best it can be.