Running-for-National-PTA-Board Campaign Flyer

Sample Running-for-National-PTA-Board Campaign Flyer

Aurelio Manuel Montemayor

Rooted in Advocacy Reared in Laredo, TX and growing up fluent in Spanish and English, Aurelio began his career as a public high school English teacher in San Felipe High School in Del Rio, Texas in 1964 and has been an activist for equitable schools since then. He continues to advocate for excellent and equitable public schools for all children, especially those that are economically disadvantaged, are of color or speak a language other than English. (For friends who are challenged in pronouncing his first name, one English speaker offered the following: Oh? Really? Oh!)

Professionally Skilled Aurelio is a senior education associate and master trainer with the Intercultural Development Research Association (IDRA). IDRA is in its 35th year of advocacy for schools that work for all children. He is the lead developer of the organization’s Family Leadership in Education Model. His four-decade professional career has been a mission driven journey in education as teacher, community organizer, curriculum developer, master trainer, and for the last 30 years at IDRA, as an advocate for parent leadership in education. He developed a fully bilingual training-of-trainers model, WOW Workshop on Workshops for educators and parents. Over 200 emerging parent leaders, many who are English-language learners, have participated in that course alone.

Proven Leadership  In over 8 years of directing a statewide federally funded Parent Information and Resource Center, Aurelio has led hundreds of workshops, written many articles, participated in conferences and colloquiums and disseminated thousands of pieces of information on Parent Leadership in Education. In 2007 he wrote monthly articles related to parent involvement and No Child Left Behind. Under his leadership, the Texas IDRA PIRC was honored last year as one of five in the nation whose practices and processes were considered exemplary in a Department of Education publication Engaging Parents in Education: Lessons From Five Parental Information and Resource Centers.

Board Experience In the summer of 2006 he was named to the National PTA board as a member-at-large and served on the Diversity Committee. This year he is part of the Finance Committee. He is a member of the Horace Mann M.S. PTA in San Antonio. He is also on the national board for Parents for Public Schools (PPS).

            Persistence His strongest recommendation is persistence (40+ years) in advocacy for excellent public schools for all children, and in that battle, supporting parents as the central and strongest advocates for all children to get an excellent and equitable education. Beyond all the training, writing and program development and evaluation he has done, his most cherished skill is the loud and persistent voice for families and children; especially those who most need the benefits and blessings of an accessible, high quality and equitable public education. Graduation for All!

            PTA Challenge We in PTA still have a way to go in bringing on board those millions of parents whose children are in public schools and who depend on public education to realize the American dream. Many of the families and schools Aurelio works with in Texas don’t see PTA as a necessary and critical part of their children achieving that dream.

            PTA Answer Yet, he believes that PTA is the organization, and the PTA members are the people, who have the history and the power for the dream of this democracy to become a reality for all of our children.