Oates Associates

Our Associates include:

Rita Oates, Ph.D.

Wendy Weiler, M.S.

Gayle Stuber, Ph.D.

William Oates, Ph.D.

Lana Tillman, M.S.

Janet Mayers, M.S.

Associates not listed here are also available for special projects from an hour to a month, depending on client needs. 

 Wendy Weiler, M.S.

Weiler Associates

 With broad experience in education sales, Wendy provides creative and insightful strategies for companies, including sales training and partnerships. "The key is listening to the customer!" she says. With a master's degree in reading and experience as VP of marketing and VP of partnerships, she brings real-world ideas for education customers of all sizes. 

As the Founder of EduStrategies, a K12 consulting firm, Weiler led a team of professionals to implement PR, sales training, marketing strategies, grants and funding, event management, and strategic account implementation. As an out-sourced resource to ALAS, as VP of Business Development, she and her team re-established and grew that organization of Latino Superintendents to be the strong voice they are today in education. In this role, she was able to align ALAS with the other key organizations such as AASA, CGCS, CALSA, and tripled their membership. She developed and sold sponsorships to K12 vendors that drove revenues to exceed expectations.  As President of EduStrategies, Weiler sucessfully launched startups and foreign companies into the U.S. education market.

Before creating EduStrategies, Weiler was the VP of New Business Development for CELT Corp., an information technology architect and learning systems integrator focused exclusively on K12 leadership. The company supported educational reform and IT needs in more than 30 districts and states, including New York City, Boston, Detroit, Broward County, Los Angeles, and Colorado Springs. Weiler was on the team that brought CCSSO/CELT Consortium to all 50 states.

Weiler was also the Director of New Business Development/Sales for Advanstar Communications. She led Advanstar’s eLearning events division including such programs as Learning and Training Week and TechLearn.  Vendor support for these two events included Microsoft, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, and IBM. Her role was driving sales revenues.

As Global Sponsorship Development Director for Giga Information Group, a worldwide analyst’s organization, she created a sales strategy that brought in more than $4 million in business revenues in one year.

As VP of Sales and Marketing for the first privately owned convention center, The Meadowlands Convention Center, she launched this facility nationally. The occupancy rate was 95% because she partnered with the newspapers, radio and TV to market and sell the convention center.

Weiler received a Bachelor’s degree in Education from Lesley College and Master’s in Education from Antioch.

To contact Wendy directly, please go to the "Contact us" page and fill in your information and request.

Janet Mayers, M.S.

In more than 30 years in the classroom, Ms. Mayers has taught all grades PK-5 as well as students with disabilities and English Language Learners in Miami-Dade County Public Schools. Her master’s degree is in computer education and technology from Barry University. She has an endorsement for teaching ESOL and has also been a reading teacher. She has taken ESE classes focusing on autism, and in retirement, regularly works with two young boys diagnosed with autism.

Lana Tillman, M.S.

Lana has taught in career education programs for secondary students and was an administrator of a tech school in Broward County serving high school and post-high school students in multiple career areas. With a master's in computer science, she also led edtech activities across Broward County Public Schools. She has done training for Burger King University in Miami, for Microsoft, and was one of the early trainers of the online PLATO system. 

William Oates, Ph.D.

With an MBA in marketing, a bachelor of engineering science, and a PhD in mass communication, Bill is a renaissance man. He loves digging into data sets to tease out meaning for customers. His motto: "We make the complex clear." His experience working at the GM Research Labs for a decade, writing about new technologies, makes him a highly experienced communicator of emerging technologies for not-so-tech-savvy audiences. His experience editing books and reports as well as leading a team of online developers has  helped him develop a keen eye for how design impacts understanding, both online and in print.

Rita Oates, Ph.D.



Rita leads Oates Associates and collaborates with various individuals and organizations for quick, pinpointed results for clients. Her passion is helping schools, districts and companies finding the funding to support their needs. She gives workshops and webinars on the topic. In 2020 she led a team that created a document on funding sources for Lenovo VR products focused on STEM uses in schools in the USA and in Canada. She also created a document for Membean on finding funding for their secondary language arts product and assisted sales staff with finding sources for specific schools and districts.

Rita knows both the education and business side of the edtech world. She was ed tech director in the Miami-Dade County Public Schools, the nation's 4th largest district, where she won two multimillion-dollar grants for co-development of software (Steps to English Language Learning, Jostens, and Choosing Success, CCC). She met Nelson Heller and Anne Wujcik when she was Education Editor of VIEWTRON, an early online service of Knight Ridder Inc.

She was publications editor at Phi Delta Kappa, the education society, where she had the pleasure of working with Edgar Dale, a board member. Most recently, Rita was VP, education markets, at ePals, where she gave talks about ePals users on the conference circuit. Microsoft employed Rita for more than nine years as a platform speaker in K12 schools and for user groups and AARP groups. She was founding editor, Heller Report: Internet Strategies for Education Markets, and she has written 15 books and more than 100 articles on education, ed tech, ed reform, and parenting.

With her husband, Bill, she wrote a monthly column, "Kids and Computers," in South Florida Parenting magazine for seven years. Rita taught at Indiana University, the University of Alabama, and was chairman of the graduate program in ed tech at Barry University in Miami Shores. Most recently, she was a visiting professor in the graduate program of Endicott College in Leysin, Switzerland. Earlier, she taught high school language arts classes and was adviser to the student newspaper and yearbook in three Kansas high schools.

She graduated from the University of Kansas with degrees in news-editorial journalism and in curriculum and instruction. She earned a masters degree in journalism and a PhD in mass communication from Indiana University, where she worked with orange-dot-era PLATO and created online lessons used by universities and the Army's DINFOS. In 2006 she worked with staff at the Ministry of Education in the UAE to assess and develop an ed tech plan for the country's public schools. Earlier she had helped large districts, including Broward (FL) and DeKalb (GA) develop ed tech plans. Most recently, she has worked with Florida districts including Orange, Pasco and Broward on acquiring and implementing new SIS, with Buffalo Public Schools on updating their tech plan, and with other districts to polish grant proposals.

She evaluated large-scale professional development efforts in three universities who received federal PT3 grants as well as many smaller grant projects. Having lived in Costa Rica as a child and since 1983 in Miami, she speaks Spanish and has worked with ministry officials in several Latin American countries. In 2012, she worked with the ESL staff from the MOE in Chile on ways to use more technology in teaching English.

In 2015, she consulted with a Chinese private school company, Weiming Education USA, that placed students into American high schools for study during their junior and senior year to prepare to enter an English-speaking university.

Gayle Stuber, Ph.D.

Gayle Stuber earned a Ph.D. in early childhood special education at the University of Kansas, the top program in special education. Earlier she earned a B.A. in elementary education and a master’s in early childhood education, also at KU.

She joined the Kansas State Department of Education (KSDE) in 1998 as an education program consultant and retired in 2016. During her tenure there, she worked in special education and was early childhood coordinator, as well as working on school improvement teams and other tasks.

She was an assistant professor of education and was director of the Baldwin-Baker Laboratory School at Baker University. For four years she was Program Coordinator of the Early Intervention Demonstration Program in the department of special education at KU.

She collaborated with state, local and national professionals to develop and implement projects and initiatives, promoting evidence-based best practices and supporting high quality early childhood education.

While at KSDE, she conducted workshops, developed reports, briefing documents and policy briefs, in which she synthesized and analyzed data, research and literature reviews. She also designed data collection processes to provide longitudinal results on program results.

She co-authored The Music and Literacy Connection (Second Edition, 2014) Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 

Several notable publications include:

Stuber, G.  (2007).  Moving from School Readiness to School Success:  Making Connections between Schools and Communities.  Kansas Child:  a publication of the Kansas Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies. Vol. 7, Issue 4,  p. 4-6.

Stuber, G. (2007).  Centering your Classroom: Setting the Stage for Engaged Learners.  Young Children.  National Association for the Education of Young Children.  Vol. 62, No. 4, p. 58-59.

Stuber, G. and Patrick, M.R. (2010). Using School Readiness Data to make a Difference in student learning. Phi Delta Kappan, Vol. 92, No. 3. p. 35-38.