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EASTVALE: Resident honored with education fellowship

BY DAYNA STRAEHLEY

Eastvale resident Ramona Patrick, 31, has come a long way from her hometown of Wichita, Kan., and Southern Methodist University, where she graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, to a charter school in South Central Los Angeles.

Teach For America brought her into education after college, when she started teaching in Lynwood in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Now she is a Ryan Fellowship recipient preparing to open a charter school in an impoverished urban area in Los Angeles next fall.

After teaching three years in Lynwood, she became a literacy coach helping other teachers improve their instruction. She also completed her doctorate in education at USC. She was a program director for Teach For America and taught at Loyola Marymount University.

Patrick moved to Eastvale in 2007 with her husband and has a son in kindergarten at Lincoln Alternative Elementary School in Corona. She said she is thrilled with the public schools in Corona-Norco Unified School District and believes in the education public schools can provide.

But Patrick has a vision to change education in the areas of greatest need.

“I couldn’t see myself teaching anywhere except an urban district,” she said recently at the end of a long day. The school has an extended day, from 7:45 a.m. to 4:15 p.m. “It’s my passion.”

She was honored with the fellowship of The Alain Locke Initiative, a national education nonprofit founded to accelerate student achievement in urban schools nationwide, including Los Angeles.

As part of that fellowship, she is placed with the principal of KIPP Empower Academy at Florence and Normandy in South Central Los Angeles. She completed a summer institute at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management with the fellowship.

The yearlong experience and support from the fellowship will prepare her to open a new charter school next year in a similar neighborhood, she said.

“It takes an extraordinary teacher and an extraordinary leadership team” to close not only the achievement gap between students of different races and economic status, but also the global achievement gap, Patrick said.

“The school I open will enable students to have a transformative impact on the world,” she said. “I have to produce a world-class education that’s competitive to any school in the world, and not just the best school in the neighborhood. That’s not good enough, or the best in LAUSD, or even California.”

Education is the tool to open opportunities for children who grow up in economically depressed urban neighborhoods and enable them to compete globally to become leaders of industries, government and society, Patrick said.

“Students from that background need to have that voice,” she said. “We truly do not understanding it.”

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