Her professional record spans more than 11 years of outperforming district peers in Texas Title I charter schools. As Founding Assistant Principal of STEM Instruction at Rocketship Public Schools, she coached a first-year team to achieve 1.4 years of math growth — ranking in the 83rd percentile of the national network as measured by NWEA MAP — while simultaneously achieving 100% staff retention through a culture of relationship-centered leadership. Prior to that, she spent six years at Uplift Education in progressively senior instructional leadership roles, where she launched a language acquisition initiative that led 87% of multilingual learners to meet or exceed their summer growth goals. She holds a Master of Education in Educational Leadership from the University of North Texas at Dallas — graduated summa cum laude — and holds Texas Principal certification (EC–12) and Teacher certification (Generalist/ESL, EC–6).

10 Years as Executive Director: Leading a Performing Arts Organization

What separates Britni from most proposed school leaders is not just what she has done in classrooms and charter schools — it is what she has built and sustained outside of them. Since August 2015, she has served as the Executive Director and lead choreographer of Gifted 4 Christ, a traveling worship arts nonprofit organization serving youth and adults across the DFW metroplex.

For a decade, she has run every dimension of that organization: managing budgets, financial reporting, and resource allocation; raising funds to provide dance scholarships for every family interested in participation; building and maintaining a monthly performance calendar through relationships with community leaders and religious organizations across the region; and producing and directing performing arts productions that have traveled throughout the Southwest. This is not a title — it is a track record of sustaining a creative organization through the full cycle of leadership: vision, operations, people, and finances.

The arts are not theoretical for Britni Cumby. She has managed artists, negotiated venue contracts, built donor relationships, handled payroll and compliance for a nonprofit, and put on productions. A.R.T.S. Academy's model emerged from lived experience.

A Real Estate Operator and Vendor Relationship Manager

Britni also actively manages three rental properties in the DFW metroplex — a responsibility that requires exactly the operational discipline a founding superintendent needs. Managing investment properties means handling tenant relationships, vendor sourcing and oversight, lease negotiations, maintenance coordination, property compliance, and cash flow management simultaneously. It is unglamorous, real-world operations work — and it is precisely the kind of multi-vendor, multi-relationship management that a startup charter school demands in its first years.

The same skills required to vet a plumber, negotiate a lease renewal, resolve a maintenance dispute, and keep three properties operating profitably are the skills required to manage facility build-outs, review vendor contracts, navigate procurement compliance, and maintain relationships with curriculum partners, insurance providers, transportation companies, and service contractors. Britni comes to these responsibilities as a practitioner.

Rooted Here. Ready Now.

Britni Cumby graduated from Cedar Hill High School in the top 10% of her class. She attended Baylor University on a path of service and leadership — a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. and the Leadership, Education and Development Living-Learning Community. She has lived and worked within miles of DeSoto for her entire adult life.

A.R.T.S. Academy is the convergence of everything she has built — as an educator, as an arts leader, as an operator, and as a member of this community.

Advisory Board