About Forward Ready
Experience Matters. So Does What You Do With It.
Forward Ready Leadership Group grew from a simple idea: good ideas only matter when they make their way into practice.
Schools aren't short on initiatives, plans, frameworks, or aspirations. The harder work is turning those ideas into something people can understand, implement, measure, and sustain.
Forward Ready works alongside school leaders to help make that happen. Whether the challenge involves leadership, organizational improvement, student readiness, emerging technology, or simply figuring out what comes next, the goal is the same: understand the context, clarify what matters, and build a practical path from vision to action.
That work is grounded in decades of experience leading schools—and in the belief that meaningful change is built with people, not handed to them.
Leadership Grounded in Experience
Randy Squier is the founder of Forward Ready Leadership Group and a longtime New York public school leader.
Over a career spanning more than three decades in education, Randy has served as a teacher, coach, athletic director, principal, and for 21 years as a superintendent of schools, including approximately 15 years leading the Coxsackie-Athens Central School District.
Across those roles, one question increasingly shaped his work—and continues to influence Forward Ready today:
How do we know our students—and our organizations—are truly ready for what comes next?
As a superintendent, Randy led work in student readiness, strategic planning, organizational improvement, community engagement, and major capital initiatives. Much of that work focused on a recurring challenge: how to move an ambitious idea from planning into everyday practice—and determine whether it was making a difference.
Today, Randy works with school leaders across New York through consulting, executive coaching, facilitation, and speaking. He also leads Redefining Ready New York, a statewide initiative helping districts move student readiness and Portrait of a Graduate work from vision toward implementation.
Randy's current work also includes serving as K–12 Senior Advisor with CSArch, where he brings a school leader's perspective to conversations about learning environments and the changing needs of students and educators.
How I Approach the Work:
I spent enough years in the superintendent's chair to know that the hardest challenges rarely come with simple answers.
Sometimes leaders need a facilitator. Sometimes they need a coach, a critical friend, or someone who has worked through a similar problem. And sometimes they simply need another experienced person at the table who can listen, ask good questions, and help turn a complicated situation into a manageable path forward.
That's what I want Forward Ready to provide.
I don't believe in arriving with a predetermined answer. I believe in understanding where you are, identifying where you want to go, and helping build the practical steps that connect the two.
What Guides the Work
Listen First.
Understand the people, history, context, and challenge—then create the conditions for leaders and teams to develop solutions they believe in and can own.
Make It Practical.
Ideas should lead somewhere. The work needs to translate into decisions, actions, systems, or experiences that people can actually use.
Measure What Matters.
Success should extend beyond what is easiest to count. Look for the evidence that tells us whether the work is actually making a difference.
Let's Move the Work Forward.
If you're working through an idea, challenge, or opportunity and think an experienced outside perspective could help, let's start with a conversation.
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