Marie Mendoza

I've dedicated 36 years to education, beginning my journey as a bilingual ESL teacher in San Antonio Independent School District in 1990-1991. For the past 3 years, I've served as Executive Director for Emergent Bilingual Programs in a large urban district, where I'm responsible for nearly 28,000 emergent bilingual students out of 69,000 total students, representing 119 languages. When I arrived, I developed a comprehensive 60-day action plan and theory of action statement that guides everything we do: when we provide clarity around state-mandated language support program implementation, invest in high-quality professional learning and coaching, and align our curriculum resources with identified student needs, then we will meet our goal of reclassifying students as English proficient in 5 years or less so they graduate with their cohort and are college and career ready. I'm a process and systems person, and the results speak for themselves. I created the first program evaluation in more than 12 years, implemented an academic return on investment process to determine which resources to keep or discontinue based on data, and developed innovative programming including a research-based program where students investigate issues in their school community and take action. The year before I arrived, only 142 students reclassified as English proficient, but in our first year we reclassified over 1,700 students, and the numbers have continued to increase. Our dropout rate has significantly decreased while our graduation rate has increased faster than the overall district. I believe in working with professionals and giving them space to do their work - I'm not a micromanager. When someone has an idea, I ask where it fits with our plan, then tell them to go do it and bring me the results.