Dr. Scott is nationally known for shaping state early learning systems—largely through her consultation with the government, nonprofit, and philanthropic leaders co-creating those systems—in Oklahoma, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri. A past president of the national board for Child Care Aware® of America, and past chair of the Missouri Coordinating Board for Early Childhood (the State Advisory Council required by the Head Start Act), she has held more than 100 such leadership roles in a stellar career. As an author, TEDx speaker, keynoter, and trainer, she now teaches how the “SASS” helps us co-create a world that works for everyone. Her original framework of Self-Aware Success Strategies (SASS) highlights seven key social and emotional intelligences with windows of developmental opportunity from birth to seven years. Each one has high relevance for our interpersonal success as adults, in every role we hold.
As a consultant, Dr. Scott has worked at the leading edges of development in our country’s early care and education systems, including projects on quality rating and improvement, professional development systems, and shared services business models. She holds an MA degree in Early Childhood Education and a PhD in Developmental and Child Psychology, both from the University of Kansas. With more than 40 years in the profession, her experience includes serving as:

• Chief Executive Officer for Child Care Aware® of Missouri (2008-2016)
• Faculty or adjunct (including online) at six colleges or universities, and supervisor of lab preschools at two universities
• Project director for one of the 31 federal Head Start/Public School Early Childhood Transition demonstration projects (early 1990s)
• Director of the nationally known Metropolitan Council on Early Learning, a Kansas City-area community mobilization initiative (late 1990s)
• Senior researcher for Pre-K Now (2005-2006)
• Board member/officer for seven local, state, and regional chapters of the National Association for the Education of Young Children, including state president of Maine AEYC (1981-1982) and AEYC-Missouri (2002-2006)

As her career capstone, Dr. Scott now empowers adults with relationship happiness. She shares practical and powerful interpersonal strategies that remove hidden barriers, ignite self-confidence, and lead to personal and professional evolution. Teaching basic "child development and brain science for the masses," Dr. Scott personalizes the impact of their first seven years of life for each listener. Engaged by her powerful Development Do-Over exercises, audiences and readers reclaim the social and emotional strategies they once used naturally, as young children, and find the enormous value of those early strategies for adult relationships of all kinds.