LOS ANGELES – As the 2026-2027 academic year commences, schools across the country face new opportunities for engaging students and improving outcomes, as well as significant challenges, including student mental health, ongoing immigration enforcement actions, and declining enrollment.
Faculty experts from Loyola Marymount University’s School of Education and Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts are available to comment on these and other issues spanning K-12 and higher education, including:
- The unique challenges facing superintendents this year
- Bilingual education needs and incentives for hiring bilingual teachers and counselors in across school districts
- Catholic school teacher preparation
- What lies ahead this academic year
Email news@lmu.edu, or call our Media Line, 310.258.4636, to request an interview with these and other LMU faculty members:
Estela Zarate
Dean, LMU School of Education
Estela Zarate is a nationally recognized higher education leader with nearly two decades of experience at institutions including California State University, Fullerton and the University of California Irvine. Before joining LMU, she was a visiting senior faculty fellow at University of Texas, El Paso’s Diana Natalicio Institute for Hispanic Student Success, while on leave from her professorship in educational leadership at Cal State Fullerton, where she also served as vice provost of academic affairs. Her scholarship examines the educational trajectories of immigrant students and students of color, including multilingual learners, first-generation college students, and anti-racist school leadership preparation. She can also speak about issues facing schools of education around the country.
Leyda Garcia
Director, LMU Family of Schools
Leyda Garcia is an expert in community schooling and was the longtime principal of UCLA Community School in Koreatown, where she fostered a culture of innovation, transformative community engagement, and research-informed practice. From there, she was named associate director for professional learning at the UCLA Center for Community Schooling. She is a 2021 alumna of LMU’s doctoral program in educational leadership for social justice and can speak about how the university engages its K-12 partners in co-creating solutions to their most pressing needs via our research and involvement of our faculty and students.
Kyo Yamashiro
Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership
Before joining the LMU SOE faculty, Kyo Yamashiro was associate research professor at Claremont Graduate University’s School of Educational Studies, where she also directed the Urban Leadership Ph.D. program. Her applied research focuses on using rigorous, practice-relevant evidence to improve student outcomes, including through a research-practice partnership with Los Angeles Unified School District via the Los Angeles Education Research Institute (LAERI), which she co-founded. Her research interests include college readiness, school and classroom climate, choice and charter schools, and accountability systems.
Jongyeon Joy Ee
Associate Professor, Department of Teaching and Learning
In her role, Jongyeon Joy Ee specializes in education for immigrant students, dual language/bilingual education, and school segregation and racial disparities, with a focus on educational equity across race, ethnicity, home language, and immigration status. She is the author of “Schools Under Siege: The Impact of Immigration Enforcement on Educational Equity,” and her research has appeared in journals including the American Educational Research Journal and Bilingual Research Journal. She earned her Ph.D. in Education from UCLA, where she was later a postdoctoral research associate at the Civil Rights Project, and holds an M.A. in Teaching of English as a Second Language from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Máire Ford
Associate Vice Provost for Faculty Development
Máire Ford supports the professional growth and success of faculty members at LMU through the Center for Faculty Development (CFD). Ford joined the faculty at LMU in 2006 as a psychology professor. She teaches a variety of courses in social psychology and health psychology, and statistical methods. Her primary research sits at the intersection of social psychology and health psychology, and her primary focus is on how the self shapes health-related responses to events such as rejection, exclusion, and other threats to belonging. Additionally, she studies various ways of imparting resilience for those experiencing loneliness or threats to belonging. She also conducts research that contributes to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation.