Executive Leadership
Three Leaders, One Message.
Our team is made up of leaders in education — researchers, teachers, designers and builders who came here to keep doing the work at a larger scale. Every one of them is here for the same reason: to inspire learners and to empower the educators who stand in front of them. Meet the people who are paving the path for tomorrow’s thinkers.
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Dr. Clint Coleman
Chief Executive OfficerThe bridge between education, industry, and state and federal agencies. Infectious disease researcher, six-time principal investigator on science packages flown to the International Space Station, former Dean of STEM, and Louisiana’s former statewide K–12 STEM and cybersecurity champion.
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Jenny McLeod
Chief Operating Officer, FounderHead of curriculum design and the architect of Central Creativity’s learning philosophies. She anchors the vision behind the programming — and she founded the company in 2017 and has run its operations ever since.
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Rhye McLeod
Chief Innovation Officer, FounderBrand ambassador, and head of data tracking and metrics. He protects the fidelity of every client brand we represent, and brings industry’s outcome-oriented processes into how the company works.
Speaking
Book Clint or Jenny for your event.
Both of them speak regularly at trade shows, conferences and state and district events — on stage, on a panel, or in a workshop room with the tables pushed together. If you are building a program and need somebody in the room who has done it, ask.
Dr. Clint Coleman
Chief Executive Officer- Research in microgravity, and what six payloads flown to the International Space Station teach you about designing an experiment
- Building a statewide STEM ecosystem, from the inside of one
- K–12 cybersecurity and the workforce pipeline behind it
- Turning a campus program into something a district can actually run
Jenny McLeod
Chief Operating Officer, Founder- Starting an education company in a small town, and what it took to keep it
- Running a program at scale: the schedule, the build and the freight behind every kit
- What afterschool and camp programs need in order to survive their second year
- Manufacturing in-house, and why we stopped waiting on somebody else’s lead time
Tell us the audience, the date and the room, and we will tell you straight away whether we can be there.
Inside HQ
Five More Departments, One Roof.
Everything we sell is designed, written, illustrated, manufactured, packed and shipped from one building in Laurel, Mississippi. These are the departments that do it.
Finance
Budgets, contracts, purchasing and the reporting that grant-funded and district work depends on. If your purchase needs a quote, a W-9, a sole-source letter or an invoice cut a particular way, this is where it comes from.
Learning Experiences
Curriculum writing, standards alignment, instructor training and the classroom testing that decides whether a lesson ships. Nothing goes in a box until this department has watched real students do it.
Art and Design
Illustration, layout and the look of every guide, box, poster and banner we produce. The reason a fifth grader picks a kit up off the table before anybody tells them to.
Operations
Scheduling, staffing, logistics and support. The department that answers the phone when a camp starts on Monday, and the one that makes sure the truck left on Thursday.
Manufacturing
Large format and commercial print, fabrication, kit assembly and fulfillment — in-house, under the same roof as the people who designed the thing being made.
Every one of these departments is reachable through one place. Tell us what you need and we will route it to the right desk.
The Team
And Everyone Else in the Building.
Twenty-two full-time people work in Laurel, and more than a hundred seasonal staff and regional trainers work with us across the country. Here is what the rest of the building actually spends its day doing.
By the Numbers
Built for where you are.Ready for where you’re going.
Small enough that the person who wrote your lesson can walk to the person packing your box. Big enough to make and ship at the scale a state or a national partner needs.
Where We Are
Come and See It.
Our headquarters in Laurel, Mississippi is not a warehouse with a sign on it. It is a working hub for educational innovation, and it is busy: schools and districts, state agencies, universities and industry partners come here from around the country to see how the work is done, and to figure out what they could do with it.
We would rather show you than describe it. The building runs on a single loop — an idea is researched, written, illustrated, prototyped, printed, built, packed and shipped without leaving it — and the fastest way to understand that is to walk it.
Twenty thousand square feet now. Fifty thousand soon.
We are renovating another 30,000 square feet next door. Drag the handle to see the building as it stands today, and as the architects have drawn it.
Today
Planned
Left: the building today. Right: the architect’s rendering of the finished renovation. The rendering is a plan, not a photograph — the work is under way.
We’d love to show you around!
Talk To Us
Reach Somebody Here.
Send us a note
Use this to reach a specific person, to ask one of us to speak at your event, or to arrange a visit to Laurel. Tell us what you are working on and we will put it in front of the right person here.
Biographies
The Longer Version.
Dr. Clint Coleman
Chief Executive OfficerClint is the bridge between education, industry, and state and federal agencies. His experience running a statewide STEM initiative, together with his work on the national STEM ecosystem stage, is how the company knows where to put its efforts — in front of the people who make the decisions, for the greatest impact on the customers and communities we serve.
Before he entered education, Dr. Coleman was part of a team doing infectious disease research, and he worked on the front lines against Ebola and AIDS in Africa. He has sent six science packages to the International Space Station, investigating how infectious diseases behave in zero gravity.
He moved into academia as Dean of STEM at Fletcher Technical Community College in southeastern Louisiana. That is where we met him — as a customer. Central Creativity helped him convert Fletcher’s in-person energy camps into a virtual camper model during the COVID-19 pandemic.
After Fletcher, Clint was asked to serve as Louisiana’s statewide K–12 STEM and cybersecurity champion, as Program Administrator for LASTEM, the state’s official STEM ecosystem. We worked closely with him and with partners across Louisiana throughout his term of service, and we were honored when he chose to join the company after leaving public service for the private sector.
It is why Central Creativity can walk into a room with industry, a state agency or a federal program and be taken seriously. Our CEO has sat on the other side of every one of those tables.
Jenny McLeod
Chief Operating Officer, FounderJenny is the head of curriculum design and the architect of Central Creativity’s learning philosophies. She anchors the vision behind the programming: what a learner should be able to do at the end of an hour, what has to be true of an activity for that to happen, and the Framework for Learning that every kit is built against.
She also founded Central Creativity in 2017 and has run its operations every day since. If a kit has ever arrived at your school on the morning you planned the lesson for, that is her department and her standard.
That side of her work is the part of the company most people never see. The production schedule. The purchase orders. The assembly line, the freight, the staffing for a camp four states away, and the hundred small decisions between an idea being approved and a box being sealed. It is the difference between a good program and a program that actually happens.
She also represents the company on the road, at trade shows and conferences, where she speaks about building an education business from a small town and keeping a hands-on program running past its first season.
Rhye McLeod
Chief Innovation Officer, FounderRhye co-founded Central Creativity and is the company’s brand ambassador. Every client brand we represent is protected and carried with fidelity through everything we do — the curriculum, the art, the packaging, the training, and the room the program runs in.
He is also head of data tracking and metrics. Every program is monitored for efficacy against the measures agreed at the start, which is what makes Continuous Learning Improvement possible: an implementation can be corrected while it is still running, rather than reported on after it has finished.
He brings the efficiencies and outcome-oriented processes of industry into the company’s workflow, and he is our route into the partnerships — the national programs, the industry sponsorships and the agency work that put our programs in front of students who would not otherwise have seen them.