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Alignment Collaborative for Education - ACE

What’s New

Alignment Launches New Fiscal Year with Generous Support from the Seigle Foundation

Seigle Foundation Awards Grant to Alignment

Alignment was recognized by the Seigle Foundation with a $25,000 grant award to kickoff its new fiscal year. The Seigle Foundation selected Alignment for this award based on its work in the Elgin and Dundee communities to prepare youth for future personal and career success.  

Alignment will utilize this generous funding to expand its work-based learning initiatives for middle and high school students throughout the Elgin and Dundee communities. That work includes career exploration as early as middle school advancing to more specialized, industry specific opportunities for high school students. Students have the opportunity to be placed in various work-based learning settings across multiple industry clusters. These opportunities are made available by Alignment’s large network of over 200 partners committed to building a future workforce that meets the economic and social growth of the community.  

Thank you to the Seigle Family for providing this investment in our youth, the community, and the region’s future workforce development.

Elgin Area Chamber’s Women’s Leadership Circle Features Alignment’s Work in the Community

Alignment is featured non-profit at the Elgin Area Chamber's Women's Leadership Circle

Alignment joined the Elgin Area Chamber’s Women’s Leadership Circle as the featured non-profit at its July 26th networking event at Pinot’s Palette in St. Charles.  

The event provided a great opportunity to update community leaders about Alignment’s summer internship program as well as upcoming fall events like Explore 2022 scheduled for October 5th and 6th at the NOW Centre. Nancy Coleman as part of the networking group shared “this event is a great opportunity to recruit additional volunteers to serve as role models for our students as we work to increase opportunities to grow career interests and leadership skills within the region’s future workforce”. 

Thank you to the Elgin Area Chamber of Commerce for this networking opportunity.

High School Interns Gain Engineering, Manufacturing, and Operations Experience

Alignment Summer 2022 Manufacturing Internships

Alignment joining with Electri-flex, Elgin Sweeper, ITW Shakeproof, and Reishauer offered seven high school juniors opportunities to gain experience in engineering and manufacturing settings as part of a summer, work-based learning experience.

Students combined their interest in engineering and applied it in manufacturing settings. Project based assignments led by experienced engineering and operations professionals guided students to address a combination of design, quality, and safety challenges requiring innovative solutions to traditional manufacturing processes.

Kush Patel, a student at Bartlett High School and intern for Elgin Sweeper, described his experience as “giving him the real workforce experience that opened my mind to see how things we learn in school apply in real life.” Mitchell Briesemeister, Director of Educational Pathways for School District U-46, confirmed that this is exactly the intent of the summer internships. “Manufacturing is a critical economic driver for our region and internships are a great way for our students to learn about the multitude of high wage careers available in the industry and the skillsets they require.”

Alignment partnering with Northern Kane County Region 110 CTE programs placed 52 students in paid, summer internship opportunities because of the outstanding support received from its corporate partners. Tom King, Engineering Manager, ITW Shakeproof, emphasized that commitment “everyone involved here at Shakeproof was impressed with the interns and the program. Students were able to come up with an innovative solution to a real-world safety issue we deal with every day.”

Thank you to our corporate partners for making these experiences possible.

Alignment Welcomes Adriana Armstrong as Executive Assistant

Adriana Armstrong joined the Alignment team as its executive assistant in June. Previously, she worked as the Director of Athletic Operations and Middle School Administrative Assistant for Westminster Christian School in Elgin. Her experience there included mentoring students and teachers along with facilitating communications to parents. She also coordinated event planning, athletic schedules, and departmental budgeting.

Adriana is actively involved in the community serving on the Streamwood Park District Board from 2009 to 2021. She currently serves in 2022 as the Board’s ethics officer. Her community experience includes working on tax levies and bond issues as well as continuous improvement initiatives within the park district utilizing community input.

Adriana accepted the position because “I wanted to be part of an organization that works with the community to support students. My goal has always been to help students discover the ways they can have a flourishing future while also giving back to the community. I am thankful to be a part of an organization that values students, families, and community.”

Architecture and Engineering Internship Highlights

Twelve students from School District U-46 recently had the opportunity to complete a two-week, paid internship with Judson University and Hampton, Lenzini and Renwick, Inc. (HLR), a local civil engineering company.

At HLR, students gained field and office experience in many different facets of civil engineering, showcasing what a career in civil engineering would look like. Highlights from their time at HLR included: engineering design and construction, traffic engineering, a wetland site visit, corridor modeling, and even a drone flight with the survey department.

“HLR has always been a company about educating and ensuring the future success of its employees. We take great pride in being able to share that vision with School District U-46 by educating students about civil engineering through this internship program. We have a lot of fun working with the students and seeing them take this level of interest at such an early stage in their education.” – Nicholas Piekarski, PE, CFM, Hampton, Lenzini and Renwick, Inc.

At Judson, the students participated in five workshops related to architectural design, requiring the students to use both creative and critical thinking skills. They were also able to experience unique workshops including camera-free photographs in a dark room and exploring visual communication through image and typography.

One of the interns, Emily Gillmore from Bartlett High School said, “Judson gave me an opportunity to learn about the developmental process of designing a public building and the creative process behind it. The hands-on experience of getting to create our own project and doing activities that are practiced in the real world was a truly rewarding experience.” 

Thank you to Judson and HLR for providing the students with such a meaningful internship experience. We are looking forward to sharing more internship highlights with you this summer!

More Student Takeaways…

“HLR quite possibly has the friendliest atmosphere I have ever seen at a job place. The company is just wonderful, and I greatly appreciate the experience and time I spent there.” – Andrew Calles, Larkin High School

“I learned to seek good opportunities that will allow me to combine something that I’m good at with something I really care about. When you love your job it’s easy to get up in the morning and spend hours doing your tasks. Hating your job will just make you miserable, even if you get paid good money.” – Anaid Braun, South Elgin High School

“I really enjoyed my time at HLR and Judson. I never realized how vast Civil Engineering could be, so exploring the possibilities through various lessons, workshops, and hands-on work expanded my knowledge in the field. The experiences I had throughout the internship were very enlightening and helped guide me towards finding a career in my future.” – Lucas Sanson, Bartlett High School

Judson Internship Photos

HLR Internship Photos

Educators Rising Conference Encourages Future Teachers to Join, Enrich Profession

Seventy-five high school students seriously contemplating careers as teachers gained powerful motivation May 25, 2022 during the Northern Kane Educators Rising Conference at NIU.

Laurie Elish-Piper, dean of the NIU College of Education, made sure of it.

Teachers, she told the teens gathered in the Carl Sandburg Auditorium, “are the ones who plant the seeds of opportunity and access.”

Teachers are the ones who sow “the seeds of belief in oneself.” Teachers are the ones “who believed in you when you didn’t believe in yourself,” she continued, “who pushed you so hard that you did things you can’t believe you actually accomplished.”

“What teachers do in their classrooms all day, every day, makes a difference for their students and also for their families, our community and our country,” Elish-Piper said. “Teaching truly is the wellspring and source of all other professions – of all other opportunities – in our world.”

Justin Johnson, the 2021 Illinois Teacher of the Year, drove the message home.

“Thank you,” said Johnson, band director at Niles West High School. “Thank you for choosing to do something that may not be the most glamorous profession but something that I believe is absolutely the most rewarding. For that, I appreciate you.”

His keynote address provided the opening to a morning of breakout sessions on college planning, career planning, lesson planning and the statewide Educators Rising organization and its vision “to pave a clear pathway in every school district in America for young people who want to serve their communities as highly skilled educators.”

Students also took NIU campus tours, enjoyed lunch in the Regency Room and listened to a panel discussion featuring current Huskies.

Christine Schweitzer, assistant director for Student Success in the College of Education, organized the event with team members from School District U-46, Community Unit School District 300, Central Community Unit School District 301, the Northern Kane County Regional Vocational System and the Elgin-based Alignment Collaborative for Education (ACE).

“My overall goal for this event was to inspire the students to become educators,” Schweitzer said. “We also wanted to broaden their experiences of being on a university campus in hopes to help them see that college is possible. For some students, this was quite possibly their only opportunity to visit a college campus.”

Planning began when Elish-Piper connected Schweitzer with Nancy Coleman, executive director of ACE, and Terry Stroh, regional director for the vocational system. Elish-Piper sits on ACE’s governing board.

Funded by an Illinois State Board of Education grant, the group focused on two objectives: strengthening the teacher pipeline and bolstering the economy of the hometowns of the students.

Driving their enthusiasm was the success of the College of Education’s PLEDGE (Partnering to Lead and Empower District-Grown Educators) initiative that already has graduated 35 elementary school teachers who never left Elgin to complete their NIU bachelor’s degrees.

“Because these students live in the Elgin area, I wanted to explain the PLEDGE program as it could be the key to making their dream of becoming teachers come true,” Schweitzer said. “The students were so enthusiastic and engaged. They truly seemed grateful for this experience. Seeing so many teenagers excited about education is really rewarding for me.”

THE SAME IS TRUE for ACE’s Coleman.

“One of the major concerns for the future socioeconomic health of the greater Elgin region, and with U-46 being such a large school district there were significant discussions already, is the teacher shortage and what we do about it,” Coleman said.

“We also were hearing it from our business community from the standpoint of employers not having adequate child care services for their employees, so employees were not returning to work,” she added. “That got significantly worse after COVID.”

Given that concern, Coleman said, ACE initially concentrated on early childhood education and efforts to improve kindergarten readiness. However, their focus eventually shifted to the teacher pipeline.

“We were already doing all this work with Terry, and across the state, in trying to get students to have pathways as early as possible in the high school experience with the career and technical piece,” she said. “We have now moved the direction toward focusing on the teacher pipeline because it solves long term a lot of those problems that the community is coming to us with.”

Coleman calls Elish-Piper “critical” to ACE’s process of identifying educational needs in the area, assembling all the stakeholders together to confront and resolve those questions and then moving on to the next challenge.

“It is extremely important that we bring the business community to the table to address these issues, as well as having our post-secondary education partners there,” she said.

“But we are dead in the water if we don’t have the commitment from secondary education – if we don’t have the commitment from the high schools,” she added. “That’s where tying all of this together, and all of the high schools having education programs within their Career Technical Education offerings, is absolutely critical.”

Stroh, who leads that exact effort within the three school districts in attendance May 25, as well in St. Charles Community Unit School District 303, was encouraged by the conference.

“This was the primer for next year and how we go forward,” Stroh said. “Students are going to start talking to other students. We actually have a parent here today from one of the districts who wanted to come with her child; parents are going to talk to other parents.”

RETELLING THE STORY and affirmational messages of keynote speaker Justin Johnson will provide excellent advertising of the event’s worth.

Growing up in a 5,000-population “country town” in rural Tennessee, Johnson’s life was changed by his first-grade teacher.

She was “one of the first people that I can remember who told me that I had to be the ability to be something other than just what I saw around me,” he told the students – and what he saw were jobs in factories or on farms.

Because neither option appealed, and with the confidence to spread his wings, Johnson went to college to pursue a career in music, whether teaching or performing.

Now a decade into his career at Niles West, he has proven himself – and his first-grade teacher, who still is checking in on her long-ago pupil – right.

“This career is so important because oftentimes you will be the only people who will see things that are needed by your students,” he told his audience in the Carl Sandburg Auditorium. “As a teacher, we sow seeds. We plant ideas. We plant ideals. We plant values in students, and many times, we do these things and never get to see the seeds that we plant grow, and that’s OK.”

As “the next wave” of educators, the high schoolers were told to “stay focused on the reason why you chose to go do this. Stay focused on the what it is that you’re trying to do. Stay focused on the who. All those things are important, and all those things are going to help keep you honest. They’re going to help keep you engaged, and more importantly, they’re going to help you fight through when things get difficult.”

Johnson shared a written message he received from a former student, one he figured was never really listening when he spoke but proved she was by covering her card in his sayings.

Her own words brought the band director to tears: I may not know where my instrument and I are going from here, but I know that I will always take what you have taught with me.

“Not that I always get those things, but when I do, it helps solidify for me the value of what it is I’m trying to do in the classroom every day,” Johnson said.

“As an educator, you have power. You have a voice, and more important than the voice for you as an educator is the voice that you have for your students. If you’re unwilling to speak up for the things that you need, it’s going to be very difficult to speak up for the things that your students need, and that is the important piece,” he added. “That has to be done by understanding why you chose to do this and keeping that at the forefront.”

But, he cautioned, “with great power comes great responsibility.”

“Your words have power. Your demeanor has power. The relationships that you build with students have power. They have the power to build you. They have the power to tear down. Luckily for me, I had a structure and system in place with far more people who built and spoke power to me than pulled me down,” Johnson said.

“I hope that the people in this room will see, and seek out, those students who really need to hear that, and not typecast based on biases we might have about the people we think they might turn out to be,” he added. “Speak power to them and uplift them – because you never know. Your words one random day might change the trajectory of somebody’s life completely.”

Mark McGowan
Manager of College Communications-NIU College of Education