Jessica D. Magagna

Jessica Magagna was born in Tangier, where her father, John Magagna, was Head of the American School of Tangier. International education was not a career she discovered so much as the world she grew up in. After Morocco came years in the United States, then Tehran, where her father led the American Community School and Jessica attended school, and later extended time in Indonesia during his tenure at Jakarta International School. Her mother, Diane, taught early childhood and spent more than seven years teaching in Egypt, Mali, Beirut, and Angola. Long before Jessica worked in international education, she had lived in it, visiting schools across Asia, Europe, and South America along the way.

Jessica earned her B.A. in Communication Studies from Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania and began her career as an Education Outreach Coordinator, teaching life skills to elementary students and managing community programs. She then spent more than a decade in retail management, concentrating on recruitment and training for upper-level management, work that turned out to prepare her well for what came next.

Jessica joined Search Associates formally in 2002 as a Senior Associate in teacher recruitment, though in truth she had been part of it since her father founded the company in 1990, stuffing packets for job fairs, copying educator files, reading the early marketing drafts he sent her way, looking over the first website he built. Search was always in the room. Working alongside her father for the next sixteen years, she came to know nearly every part of the company from the inside, and to understand what had driven him to build it, a conviction that strong schools are built by strong educators, and that students feel the difference.

When her father retired in 2018, Jessica was appointed CEO and is now the sole owner of Search Associates. Since then, she has focused on building the team and the infrastructure to carry that work forward. She brought together an executive team to lead alongside her, including a director role created specifically to keep the educator experience at the center of how the company operates. She guided Search Associates through the pandemic and out the other side, and led the organization’s diversity, equity, and inclusion work, from rebuilding educator profiles to developing our guiding statements. Most recently she has overseen a full rebrand and a new website built from the ground up, giving Search Associates a modern look and a platform equipped for where international recruitment is heading, while keeping intact what made educators and schools trust us in the first place.

For all of that change, Jessica has kept one thing exactly where it has always been. She still personally manages the Cambridge fair, the first fair her father ever ran, organizing it each year alongside her nephew. It is a fitting piece of the job for someone whose main charge is keeping the company true to what it was built to be.

Jessica lives in Northeast Pennsylvania with her two children, Ethan, in his first year of college, and Rachel, 16. She enjoys traveling, reading and skiing, and most of all, time spent with her family.