LMU School of Education alumnae Elyse Colgan ’10, Raquel Michel ’08 and Stephanie Nunez-Marroquin ’09 were recently featured in two separate articles in the Los Angeles Times.
Locke High School graduation: A Locke High milestone
By Rick Rojas
After Locke High was turned over to charter-school operator Green Dot Public Schools in 2008, counselors Raquel Michel and Stephanie Nunez-Marroquin were presented the difficult task of seeing the students who had started at Locke through to graduation. Locke had become known as a “dropout factory,” with graduation rates below 40 percent. But Michel and Nunez-Marroquin, both products of LMU’s Counseling Program, turned their office into a sanctuary where students knew they could go for advice, or simply comfort. In June, their final cohort graduated at a rate of more than 75 percent. Michel and Nunez-Marroquin are now taking on a similar challenge at Green Dot-run Jordan High. “If I hadn’t gone to LMU I wouldn’t have been prepared for the socio-emotional aspects of that first year,” says Michel. “It was such a well-rounded program,” agrees Nunez-Marroquin. “We always pride ourselves on coming from LMU.”
Op-Ed – Education: The magic of hard work
By Jim Newton
Elysa Colgan is a graduate of the LMU/Teach For America Partnership program in Los Angeles, where she served for two years as an eighth grade math teacher at Charles R. Drew Middle School in south Los Angeles and made a significant impact on her students’ achievement. Newton writes, “There are neither shortcuts nor secrets to successful teaching. Colgan made promises to her students, and she kept them. At the beginning of her first year, most of Colgan’s eighth-graders tested at between a fourth- and fifth-grade math level. By the end of the year, two-thirds were proficient at their grade level. Her second-year results were even more dramatic.” Colgan remains committed to education reform in Los Angeles, currently working for TFA as a recruitment director at universities in the Southern California region. Read the full column.
The LMU School of Education has been Teach For America’s preferred university partner in the Los Angeles region for the past decade, providing graduate training and support for TFA corps members. In 2010 the LMU School of Education became TFA’s university partner in the San Francisco Bay Area, making LMU the exclusive university partner in California and the LMU/TFA Partnership one of the organization’s largest and most successful in the country.
