About Us
The Canizales sisters are products of public schools, bilingual education, college-access programs, and immigrant perseverance.
Through our collective 50+ years of experience supporting equity-driven educational outcomes in PreK-16 educational institutions, the Canizales Group has deep experience across stakeholders, including students, families, teachers/educators, coaches, administrators, and executive leadership.
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Founding Partner
Mayra Canizales Cruz (she/her/ella)is a lifelong educator passionate about making schools affirming places for children and adults by creating anti-racist and linguistically liberating practices and systems. She was an award-winning and equity-driven school principal at Oyster-Adams Bilingual School for seven years. She is experienced in systems thinking to operationalize around an intended outcome. She is a thoughtful community organizer and intentionally disrupts visible and invisible systems of power to create spaces that center students, educators, and families of color. Mayra has strengths in school leadership development, dual language, adult coaching, diversity, equity and inclusion, and powerful & patient facilitation to hold difficult conversations in both Spanish and English.
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Founding Partner
Yanira Canizales Wandera (she/her/ella) is a dedicated educator and community advocate with decades of experience designing transformative educational experiences with the community. As a mother, founding school leader, and local educational advocate, she brings a micro and macro perspective to the challenges and opportunities within education. Yanira excels in shifting power dynamics and disrupting systemic racism through community co-creation and liberatory design. With deep expertise in community engagement and coalition building, she is passionate about achieving linguistic liberation and excellent student outcomes. Her strengths also include strategic planning and designing and facilitating impactful adult learning experiences.
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Founding Advisor
As a college professor, counselor, researcher, college access practitioner, and adult trainer, Dr. Claudia Canizales Aguilar has worked with students, families, teachers, counselors, and administrators throughout the K-16 pipeline to ensure students meet their academic and personal goals. Dr. Aguilar’s expertise lies in creating school counseling and college access programs that are equitable, systematic, student and family-centered, and effective in ensuring that students have an actionable post-secondary education plan. Dr. Aguilar has dedicated significant efforts to creating parent/family engagement programs that move away from the educator-as-expert parent-meeting model by embracing parents’ hopes and experiences as central to any conversation regarding their children’s futures.
OUR VISION
We envision a national education system with enough high-quality Dual Language seats to serve all 4.95 million emergent bilingual learners. In this vision, Latino/x led principals are empowered to lead in their communities, nurturing, challenging, and equipping students to become anti-racist, multilingual leaders. Our ultimate goal is to reverse the trend of heritage language loss and ensure every emergent bilingual student achieves biliteracy.
“One of the greatest assets The Canizales Group brought was the ability to quickly and effectively establish trust. The Canizales Group is well-organized, thorough, flexible, and focused on student and community needs.”