Spring 2000
ACEE Members Participate in USDE Conference and Town Meeting
ACEE Members Isabel Lopez and Rosa Delgado from the Sanchez PALs (Parent Advocates for Literacy) program, along with Mary Ellen Isaacs (ACEE trainer) and Ed Leo (Sanchez Principal) made a presentation at the Improving America's Schools Conference in Chicago held in mid-December. PALs participation in the conference was initiated by Naomi Karp of the U.S. Department of Education, who observed PALs during a visit to Sanchez last February. She was impressed with what she saw and invited PALs program participants to present at the conference. PALs was one of only a handful of pre-K programs selected nationwide to present at this year's conference.
According to Isaacs, AmeriCorps did a fantastic job, and drew the attention of quite a few people at the conference. The skills and expertise that the parents demonstrated were so amazing they led one conference participant to ask whether the PALs participants were in fact parents or teachers.
The PALs presentation was so impressive that the U.S. Secretary of Education invited PALs participants to be part of a national town meeting on innovative early childhood programs, held in Washington, D. C. Lopez, Leo, and Isaacs flew to Washington in January to participate in the town meeting, which was broadcast nationally by satellite. After the town meeting, Secretary Rod Riley thanked Lopez for participating and praised her for her work in PALs.
An interesting addition to this story, and one that truly captures the power and spirit of the ACEE and PALs programs, concerns Lopez, a second-year ACEE member and parent in PALs. As a parent of two children who started in the PALs program three years ago, she was recruited and trained by Sanchez to be a PAL. After one year in the program, Lopez was recruited to be a member in the ACEE program. Unlike most ACEE members who have at least some college education, Lopez had not completed her high school education. She became interested in early childhood education through her PALs experience and saw the AmeriCorps education award as a way to pursue her new career interests. However, to receive the AmeriCorps eduction award, she first had to complete her GED. Over the past two years Lopez has been attending GED classes. After arriving home from the Chicago conference last December, she received word that she had passed her GED exam. Currently, Lopez is making plans to attend Austin Community College next fall to begin classes for a career in early childhood education.