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Jeff Williams had ideas, charm and a very loud voice

By Ed Goldman

One of my region’s most innovative, resourceful and occasionally mercurial talents died unexpectedly a few weeks ago, at the age of 62. Jeff Williams, a former accountant, college teacher and sought-after expert witness in number-juggling cases, founded School Innovations and Achievement more than a decade ago, growing a niche business, for which he’d been the CFO, into the “back office” for almost every school district in California.

In the early 2000s, school districts wrestled with a mishmash of state mandates, most having to do with employee background checks. When Williams realized a few years in that those mandates were going to head into the sunset, as most state mandates do, he switched the focus of his Sierra foothills-based company to one of the most pernicious problems of elementary-through high school education: absences.

He and his intrepid chief operations officer, Susan Cook, had discovered disturbing facts about AWOL kids: the pattern for their lives was often established in their first three years of school – and if absences were a predominant part of those, most would spend the rest of their lives catching up. Or trying to. It was a problem that reached across all cultures and colors.

So SI&A became a software developer and provider, creating a system called Attention2Attendance, or A2A (humble-brag: I named it). It had his staff monitoring the attendance records of their clients’ schools. It was a sort of cyber Three Strikes and You’re out program, with the first offense automatically engendering a letter sent to the absent kid’s parents or guardians, the second offense resulting in a call from the school principal and the third prompting a sitdown meeting and whatever results seemed necessary. The beauty of the program, which claimed 100 percent effectiveness, was that a majority of the offenses were resolved once that first letter was received.

Williams was a public relations/marketing client of mine for several years, which provided me my one and only glimpse into the mind of someone who could always bring a laser-like vision to adapting to the changing needs of his market. Along the way, he also proved to be a generous boss and community philanthropist, buying out the house each Christmas and treating his increasingly large staff and their families to Sacramento Theatre Company productions of “A Christmas Carol” and a hilarious reboot of “Cinderella,” with music by the supremely talented Greg Coffin, performed in alternating years.

While I had been president of the theatre and nominated Williams for its board of directors, he’s the one who thought up rewarding his employees and families–and, significantly, he was still sponsoring the annual event long after I’d left the board and even our business arrangement. When I thanked him for his largesse, he opened a window into his early life: throughout his 20s he’d cared for his ailing parents. He said he felt he’d missed having a normal young-adulthood and clearly prized the notion of family. In fact, he later hired his sister and her son to work for his company.