Kayla Svedin

Kayla Svedin is a wife to a high school calculus and physics teacher and mother of 4 children, aged 10, 6, 4, and 2, living in central Arizona. She is the founder of Empowered Arizona Families, a non-profit organization she began in 2020 with 3 other parent advocates. EmpoweredAF is dedicated to serving the needs of over 10,000 Arizona families using the Empowerment Scholarship Account program for their children’s educations, through parent organizing, training, advocacy, and engagement. She has spoken both nationally and internationally on the topic of educational freedom and the importance of respecting and supporting the agency of families in choosing and accessing what works best to meet the educational needs of their children. Kayla also has experience in the world of medical advocacy, as the daughter of a medically disabled single mother, and being mother to her 4 year old son who is medically complex with congenital disabilities. She has seen the shift from system-centered planning to person-centered planning in the disability community and believes it is past time for this shift to come to the educational world so we can have truly student-centered education.