Notre Dame teaching program is in its second generation

Published: 2007-09-06

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- The University of Notre Dame's Alliance for Catholic Education program has been placing college graduates as volunteer teachers in Catholic schools since 1994. That means the current participants were in elementary school when the program started and could have been taught by ACE teachers. Colleen Knight Santoni was a sophomore at Notre Dame in Indiana, studying Spanish and getting ready for medical school when she decided in 1994 to be a volunteer teacher through the ACE program. When she graduated from Notre Dame in 1996, she joined ACE and taught at All Saints Catholic School in Fort Worth, Texas. During a visit to Notre Dame, she ended up bringing one of her students, Patricia Salazar, along with her. The trip obviously made an impression on Salazar who joined ACE last year after graduating from The Catholic University of America in Washington. This spring, she finished her first year in the program, teaching religion, social studies, science and language arts to the third- and fourth-grade classes at Sacred Heart, a dual-language Catholic school in Washington. ACE trains young Catholic adults as teachers and places them in Catholic schools. Participants receive a small stipend from the schools where they teach and also earn master's degrees in education after two years of teaching and intensive summer training.

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