── OUR STORY
Built From Experience. Created for Impact.
For more than three decades, founder Wylie Howard Jr. has worked across multiple levels of education, including classroom instruction, behavioral intervention, school administration, technical and career education, workforce development, and alternative education leadership. Through each assignment, one lesson remained consistent, sustainable transformation begins when leaders are willing to understand people, strengthen systems, and create pathways that allow individuals and organizations to move forward.
Alt-Ed Consulting Group was created to bring those lessons beyond a single school or organization. Today, the company helps educational institutions, nonprofits, community organizations, and leaders confront complex challenges with practical strategies grounded in experience, relationships, accountability, opportunity, and restoration.
── MEET THE FOUNDER
Wylie Howard Jr.
Wylie Howard Jr. is an educational leader, author, consultant, and advocate whose career has been shaped by working with students, educators, and communities facing some of education's most complicated challenges.
His journey in education began in the classroom, where he spent nine years teaching American History. He later served as a behavioral specialist before moving into school administration and ultimately senior educational leadership. Over more than two decades as a leader, Howard has served in traditional schools, alternative education settings, and technical colleges, developing experience across secondary, postsecondary, career, workforce, behavioral, and alternative education.
His leadership experience includes serving as an assistant principal in a comprehensive high school of approximately 3,000 students, leading alternative education programs, serving in leadership roles at technical colleges, and spending more than a decade as an alternative education principal. His work has included responsibility for programs serving court-involved youth, students with significant behavioral needs, adult learners, workforce education participants, and individuals whose educational journeys required a different pathway.
Throughout that career, Howard has remained committed to a central idea, people can be held accountable for where they are while still being supported in becoming something greater.
── LEADERSHIP THAT PRODUCES RESULTS
Experience Matters. Results Matter Too.
Howard's leadership philosophy has been tested in real schools, with real students, real employees, real budgets, and real organizational challenges.
His work has contributed to measurable improvements in student attendance, graduation outcomes, academic performance, testing participation, positive behavior systems, school culture, workforce programming, and organizational effectiveness. He has led the expansion and integration of educational programs, developed partnerships between schools and communities, supported career and technical education pathways, and helped create environments designed to reconnect students with education and opportunity.
His experience also extends beyond traditional K-12 education. Through leadership roles in technical education, he has worked with postsecondary programs, career preparation, industry-aligned pathways, and workforce development. That broader perspective influences Alt-Ed Consulting Group's belief that educational success should ultimately connect learning with purpose, credentials, employment, independence, and meaningful opportunities beyond the classroom.
── THE ALTERNATIVE MINDSET
Alternative Should Never Mean Lesser.
Alternative education is sometimes viewed through the lens of what students could not accomplish somewhere else. Alt-Ed Consulting Group approaches it differently. We begin with possibility.
Students may arrive carrying behavioral challenges, academic gaps, interrupted education, court involvement, trauma, disengagement, or circumstances that have complicated their educational journey. Those realities cannot simply be ignored, but neither should they become ceilings on what those students can accomplish.
The alternative mindset recognizes that different circumstances may require different strategies, different environments, different relationships, and different pathways. Expectations remain high, accountability remains essential, and achievement remains the goal.
This philosophy is captured in another principle that guides our work, relationship before rigor does not mean relationship instead of rigor.
Relationships create the foundation from which accountability, instruction, growth, and achievement can take place.
── FROM EXPERIENCE TO FRAMEWORK
The Development of ALTER
Awareness. Love. Tailored Learning. Empowerment. Restoration.
Years of working with students, families, educators, leaders, and organizations eventually revealed recurring principles behind meaningful transformation. Those principles became the foundation of the ALTER Framework.
ALTER provides a structure for looking beyond surface-level challenges and examining the people, relationships, systems, opportunities, and environments that influence outcomes.
It represents what Alt-Ed Consulting Group believes about transformation, change does not begin by lowering expectations. It begins by changing the approach.
RECOGNITION AND LEADERSHIP
Service Recognized. Impact Remembered.
Over the course of his career, Howard's leadership and service have received recognition, including the Broward Alliance of Black School Educators Leadership Award, recognition by Legacy South Florida as a Top Black Educator, and multiple nominations for Principal of the Year.
While recognition represents meaningful milestones, the greater measure of the work remains the students who rediscovered possibility, the educators who developed into stronger leaders, the programs that improved, and the organizations that became better equipped to serve their communities.
── WHY ALT-ED CONSULTING GROUP
Experience Becomes Most Valuable When It Can Serve Someone Else.
Alt-Ed Consulting Group exists to turn decades of practical experience into strategies that other leaders and organizations can use.
We understand that organizations do not need another consultant who simply identifies what is wrong. They need partners who can listen, understand the environment, recognize what is already working, identify what must change, and help build practical solutions that can survive after the consultant leaves.
Whether the challenge involves leadership, alternative education, organizational culture, behavior, workforce development, professional learning, or comprehensive transformation, our work begins in the same place, understanding the people and the organization before prescribing the solution.