Our Team

Executive Director

PAGE’s founder and executive director, Deborah Hicks-Rogoff, was raised in a small town in the Western North Carolina mountains. Educated in public schools, she earned a doctorate in Education and Human Development from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Deborah is a social entrepreneur, teacher, researcher, and writer who for three decades has focused her work on the educational needs of children in rural working-class America. A well-known voice in the education field for her writings about literacy, Deborah is the author of three books. These include her memoir of teaching, The Road Out: A Teacher’s Odyssey in Poor America. Deborah has appeared as a guest on public radio, including The Diane Rehm Show and The State of Things.

Deborah and her husband, Leonard, live in Chapel Hill and Madison County, North Carolina. She travels in Western North Carolina and Eastern Kentucky for her work in PAGE and loves getting to know other communities and educators in Appalachia.

Listen to Deborah talk about The Road Out on The Diane Rehm Show.

Program Director

Maia Surdam is an educator, historian, and baker located in Marshall, NC. Originally from a small town in rural Michigan, Maia became the first person in her family to graduate from college, and then went on to earn a Ph.D. in U.S. History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Maia has taught classes in U.S. history, writing, and oral history at Kenyon College, Warren Wilson College, and Mars Hill University. Besides for her classroom experience, Maia is trained in the kitchen as well, most notably at OWL Bakery in West Asheville, where she learned to make sourdough bread and pastries and remains a partner.

Maia began working with PAGE in the Summer of 2018 by launching an Oral History Program. She organized training workshops for our interns, developed curriculum, and led classroom activities around deep listening practices and interviewing skills for our 7th graders. She has shared her passion for history and food with the PAGE girls by organizing programs that connect students to Appalachian history and tradition, including this oral history project about Appalachian Foodways. Beginning in early 2020, Maia became PAGE’s year-round Program Director. She oversees our Summer Programs and works with project facilitators and community members to develop and implement exciting learning opportunities for middle-and high-school girls in Madison County during the school year. She is always looking to connect with other educators, artists, and WNC community members who may wish to contribute to PAGE’s programming. Reach out to her if you’re interested in learning more!

Assistant to the Program Director

Debbie Chandler has been a beloved member of our PAGE team since 2010. In her early years with PAGE, she served with our team each summer in varied roles: instructional assistant, community liaison, bus driver, and – on special occasions – singer of Appalachian ballads. Debbie is the granddaughter of Dellie Chandler Norton, who received a North Carolina Heritage award for her singing of traditional mountain ballads. Debbie has deep ties going back multiple generations to the Laurel community in Madison County, North Carolina.

Since 2021Debbie has served as Assistant to the Program Director. In her new year-round leadership role, Debbie oversees participant enrollment and tracking, serves as a community liaison across Madison County, and provides instructional support with our PageLabs. Her new role engages Debbie in collaborations and partnership-building: with her former colleagues in Madison County Schools, in rural communities, with PAGE’s Staff and our Intern team, and with other diverse stakeholders. Debbie continues to inspire us with her deep faith in the capacity of education to empower girls in her beloved mountains.

Curriculum Specialist and Instructor: Documentary Arts

Jenny has served with PAGE since 2015, recently joining PAGE's teaching and leadership team as an instructor and documentary arts curriculum specialist. In this role, Jenny works closely with PAGE’s Program Director to integrate documentary arts with interdisciplinary learning in the humanities and STEM. She designs and teaches new learning opportunities including field-based labs and workshops that feature storytelling through creative arts.

Jenny is a graduate of Duke University, where she received a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship in Arabic language, and was a Lewis Hine Fellow at the Center for Documentary Studies. Jenny was drawn to work with PAGE to experience firsthand where creating opportunities for girls and young women can lead, as well as the ripple effect this work can have throughout communities. She is passionate about facilitating experiential labs and education projects that weave together science, technology, media arts, and storytelling while also fostering meaningful connections between students, their communities, and the natural world.

Director of Evaluation

Jessica Sperling leads an external PAGE Evaluation team that includes Megan Gray, Project Manager and Research Analyst. Both Jessica and Megan work in Duke University’s Social Science Research Institute as Evaluation and Engagement specialists.

In her role as Lead Evaluation and Engagement researcher in SSRI, Jessica is dedicated to developing community-engaged and applied research, improving programs through responsive and collaborative evaluation, and developing educational programming with hands-on learning opportunities. She holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where she focused on immigration, race/ethnicity, and inequality. Prior to joining SSRI, Jessica worked in research and evaluation in higher education and nonprofits in New York. Since moving to North Carolina, she has been busy exploring local foods and cultures and happily acclimating to a southern pace of life.

Jessica and Megan Gray provide design and implementation leadership with the evaluation of our programs: from developing a Logic Model, to designing evaluation practices and tools, to analyzing results and impact over time. They help PAGE track the shorter, medium, and long-term impact of its programs and provide data-based recommendations for PAGE’s continual improvement. Jessica and Megan are committed to community, partner, and stakeholder engagement with all phases of PAGE’s external evaluation.

Creative Communications Specialist

Ryn McCall blends their love of the land, visual storytelling, and community engagement into their multifaceted role as PAGE's Communications Specialist. With a Bachelor of Science in Ecological Agriculture and Rural Sociology as well as an Associate's Degree in Creative Writing, Ryn brings a unique interdisciplinary perspective to their work as a documentary artist, social media manager, and documentary arts project facilitator.

Whether tending to their hobby farm or immersed in Appalachian food and folkways, Ryn's deep appreciation for rural lifeways permeates their artistic practice. As a documentarian, Ryn uses photography, film, and written narrative to weave vibrant place-based stories As both an artist and an advocate, Ryn's hands-on engagement with land-based lifeways informs the empathetic, spirit-driven quality of their visual storytelling. Their passion for uplifting grassroots change-makers led them to join the PAGE team in 2022, where they utilize their multi-talented skill set to amplify the organization's mission.