About Choose to Succeed
Founded in San Antonio.
Committed to San Antonio.
Choose to Succeed was created in 2012 when local foundations and community members joined together with one goal: ensuring every San Antonio family has access to a high-performing school, regardless of their zip code.
Board of directors
Our leadership
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Steve C. Lewis
Board Chairman
Steve C. Lewis is the former Chairman of the Board of Jefferson Bank and Jefferson Bancshares, Inc. Jefferson Bank is a community bank with 13 locations in greater San Antonio and Austin. Steve serves as Chairman of the Ewing Halsell Foundation and Elma Dill Russell Spencer Foundation. He is a Director Emeritus of the Texas Wildlife Association Foundation, and a former Director of the Texas Agricultural Land Trust and the Cibolo Nature Center. He is an Honorary Director of Texas & Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association. Steve was an active farm and ranch broker for many years. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a Bachelor of Business Administration and holds a law degree from St. Mary's University School of Law. Steve and his wife, Susan, have three sons.
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Victoria B. Rico
Board Treasurer · Founding Chairwoman
Victoria is a native of San Antonio and the current Chairwoman and Trustee of the George W. Brackenridge Foundation. In 2009, she became a trustee for the Foundation and has been heavily involved in San Antonio's education quality ever since. In 2011, she published A Proposed Strategy for San Antonio: High-Quality Charter Replication which was the foundation for Choose to Succeed and its efforts — which she founded and served as Chairwoman through 2014. In addition to her work with the Brackenridge Foundation, Victoria has served on the board of BASIS Schools, Great Hearts Academies, and IDEA Public Schools. She currently serves as the Treasurer for the Choose to Succeed board. She holds a J.D. from the University of Texas at Austin and a bachelor's degree from Harvard University. She and her husband, Martin, live in San Antonio with their two children.
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Henry B. Gonzalez III
Board Secretary
Henry Gonzalez is a native of San Antonio. A practicing lawyer, he has been involved in promoting high-performing charter schools since 2008. He currently serves as the Secretary for the board of Choose to Succeed. He received a Bachelor of Business Administration from the University of Texas at Austin and a JD from the Baylor University School of Law. Henry also serves as a Director of Jefferson Bank. He and his wife, Barbie, have three children.
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Will Harte
Board Vice Chair
Will Harte is a native Texan and active in ranching and the oil and gas business. For the past decade, Will has been actively involved in supporting education initiatives. He currently serves as the Vice Chair of the Choose to Succeed board. He is a former trustee of the Texas Agricultural Land Trust and the Texas Wildlife Association.
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Chris Barbic
Board Member
Chris Barbic serves as a partner at The City Fund, a national non-profit organization that supports local leaders in cities working to grow the number of great public school options. Chris began his career as a middle school English teacher in the Houston Independent School District in 1993, as a corps member in Teach For America. In 1998, Chris founded YES Prep Public Schools, a Houston-based charter school network that exists to increase the number of students from underserved communities who graduate from college, and served as CEO for 13 years. In 2011, Chris became the founding superintendent of the Achievement School District (ASD) in Tennessee. Under Chris' leadership, ASD schools grew faster than the Tennessee state average in Math and Science every year of operation at a time when Tennessee was the fastest improving state in the country.
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Brandon Seale
Board Member
Brandon served as the President of West Texas Gas Utility, which delivered energy to 75 cities and a half a million people in two countries and four states, including some of the most iconic places in Texas. He studied at the University of Texas at Austin, Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM), and Washington and Lee University. In the course of his career, he has undertaken some of the most challenging projects in the region: building cross-border pipelines to drilling the first shale wells in Mexico to retrofitting "clean hydrogen" plants in Corpus Christi to searching for lost battlefields and recovering first declarations of independence. His podcast "A New History of Old Texas" has been downloaded more than 700,000 times and may have recently helped rediscover the biggest battlefield in Texas history.
Staff
Our team
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Dan Fishman
Chief Executive Officer
Dan serves as CEO of Choose to Succeed, where he works to support excellent educators as they build and grow quality schools for all of San Antonio's children. Prior to this, Dan was Senior Vice President for Growth at IDEA Public Schools, where he helped lead one of the nation's top-performing public charter school networks to add an additional 50,000 seats to serve students across 8 new regions and 3 additional states. Prior to IDEA, Dan served as Director of the K–12 Education program at The Philanthropy Roundtable, an association of nearly 700 individuals, foundations, and generous families. Dan began his career in education as a TFA corps member on the Zuni Indian Reservation in New Mexico, where he taught high school history and coached football. Afterwards, Dan taught English and Western culture at a university in Qingdao, China. Dan earned a bachelor's degree in foreign service from Georgetown University and an MBA from the Berkeley Haas School of Business. He serves on the board of Blueprint.