Juliet García, president of the University of Texas at Brownsville (UTB) and chair of the Notre Dame Task Force on the Participation of Latino Children and Families in Catholic Schools, will be the principal speaker at the 14th annual graduation ceremony for the University of Notre Dame’s Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE) program Saturday (July 11) at 3 p.m. in the Leighton Concert Hall of the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center.
Master of education degrees will be conferred on 86 graduates who have received instruction on campus the past two summers and served during the 2007-08 and 2008-09 academic years in Catholic schools nationwide. Forty-six graduates will receive master of arts in educational administration degrees from ACE’s Mary Ann Remick Leadership Program.
García became president of UTB in 1992 after serving as president of Texas Southmost College (TSC) for six years. While at TSC, she was recognized as the first Mexican-American woman in the nation to become president of a college or university. In 1993, she was named by Hispanic Business Magazine as one of the nation’s 100 Most Influential Hispanics and now is featured as such in multiple issues of the magazine. She is a recipient of the American Association of Higher Education Hispanic Caucus Award for Distinguished Leadership in Higher Education and the Outstanding Texas Leader Award from the John Ben L. Sheppard Leadership Foundation. García also has served as chair of the American Council on Education and as a commissioner on the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanic Americans.
Founded in 1994 by Rev. Timothy R. Scully, C.S.C., and Rev. Sean McGraw, C.S.C., the ACE program supports three academic components at the center of its growing initiatives to sustain and strengthen Catholic schools in the United States.
The teaching formation program provides college graduates an opportunity to earn master of education degrees while serving as teachers in under-resourced Catholic schools nationwide. ACE participants make a two-year commitment to teach in these schools while living in community with one another. More than 85 recent college graduates from a wide variety of educational disciplines enter the ACE teaching program each year. They take courses and participate in teacher training projects at Notre Dame during their two summers in the program and are assigned to full-time teaching positions at schools in more than 30 cities and 14 states during the academic year. After two years, the students graduate with a master’s degree, and about 75 percent elect to remain in education.
The Mary Ann Remick Leadership Program is a 26-month degree program that prepares committed and talented leaders to serve as Catholic school administrators.
ACE also offers the English as a New Language (ENL) Program, a one-year licensure program which prepares Catholic schoolteachers to serve more effectively the needs of students whose native language is not English.