This spring, Mary applied for and received a one-year sabbatical from her current job working as a teacher trainer in English Language Development (ELD) for the West Contra Costa County Unified School District in the East Bay, CA.

She has been accepted by International Educators for Africa – a project of the USAID-funded program International Foundation for Education and Self-Help (IFESH), was founded by Dr. Leon H. Sullivan – to spend the year in Ethiopia working at the Bahirdar University, Faculty of Humanity as a pre- and in-service teacher-trainer in the university’s English Language Improvement Program. Mary will be in Ethiopia for the entire academic year beginning in September 2011.

Mary and her partner Phoebe see Silva Kurtisa regularly. lives in Berkeley and is working for Cal-Berkeley Haas School of Management [7-11]

Earlier Mary had this to say about her activities.

I've been busy with end of term projects,  including, get this, choreographing a hip hop number for 15 fourth  graders!!!  One of my lesser known talents (probably for good  reason).  Our multicultural festival takes place tomorrow.  Other than  that, I've been heavily involved with the Bay Area Writing Project -- a yearlong  teacher research group on equity and serving as a member of their English  Language Learner team.  This has also been a large focus of my work at  school where I serve on our ELD Lead Team -- 4th and 5th grade are doing  content-based ELD using our new science curriculum -- PHYSICS -- the only subject I ever  failed in high school!!!!  But the challenges of successfully frontloading  the ELD in the face of heavy content and language requirements has proved  extremely rewarding. [6-08]

Email:  mlugton17@gmail.com