Ebony Britton There were signs ealry on thtaEbony Britt on ‘09M was meant to be aetache,r although she di’dt nsee themtafrst. She graduated from Penn State in 2005 with a dergee in boradcast jounralism and headedotNew York City hopingot break into the news busines,sbut quiclky decided thtawasn’t for he.rIt was while working for Erie’s Barber NationalnI stituet that she eralized she lvoed working with childer n with autism, andtheaducation was her callin.g As a studetnin Mercyhurs’ts graduate program in special edutcioan, she taugth at the R. Benjamin Wiley Chatrer Schoo.l After graduation, she taugththeer for several years beofre headingotChesetr, Pennsylavnia, ot teach and eanra second master’s degree in eductaion form Newman University. Back in Erie again, she worked as lead teacher for Mercyhurst’s after-school program at the BookTe. rWashington
Center. She was passionate about the need to improve literacy skills to help inner-city students succeed and prepare for jobs that could lift them out of poverty. Ebony secured grant funding to install i-Ready technology. “We saw great results,” Ebony says. “The kids were able to interact in person with tutors, but also had i-Ready to track their progress and generate lessons to help with problem areas like comprehension or phonics.” In 2016, Ebony relocated to the warmer climate of Naples, Florida, where she’s now a behavior specialist with the Collier County Public Schools. She works with students with high-functioning autism, as well as children of migrant workers, who rarely spend a full term in a single school. Eventually, she hopes to open an ABA (Applied Behavior Analysis) clinic to help meet a huge need in her area for the kind of services that Erie residents take for granted. “I want to help bridge the gap and Cole can trace his fascination with South America to a high school history class. Assigned to report on any fgure from world history, he wrote about Eva Peron – and was dismayed to discover he was the only student who focused on a fgure from Latin America. “Their stories and cultures are just as rich as the stories and cultures of Europe,” he says. “Too often we gloss over the richness on our own side of the world.” He was immersed in those stories at the National University in Catamarca, a rural province near Argentina’s border with Chile. During breaks, he visited Brazil, Uruquay, Chile, Patagonia, and nearly a dozen Argentine provinces. Virtually no one spoke English and, despite years of Spanish study, it was somewhat overwhelming to listen, comprehend and think in Spanish. He came back with a variety of souvenirs, including, he laughs, an Argentine accent. And, more importantly, a deeper awareness that the way we do things here is not the only right way.
help families get the best possible educational experiences for their children with special needs,” she says. “If one person doesn’t do it, who will? I need to at least try.”
Her personal project these days is a children’s book she’s written titled Adventures of Ebbie and Bogo , in which her character encounters children with a variety of disabilities. “I feel you don’t see enough children with autism or other disabilities in children’s literature right now,” she says, “and I hope to help change that.” Ebony returned to work recently after the birth of her second son, Elijah Robert. His big brother, Carmen, is 7.
Cole Lowe
Shortly before his graduation, Spanish education major Cole Lowe ’18 got a piece of great news – he’d been accepted for the prestigious and highly competitive Fulbright Language Teaching Assistant program and chosen to spend nine months teaching English in Argentina. There was just one problem. He was also pursuing high school teaching jobs and he’d now have to let potential employers know he’d be unavailable for parts of the next two school years. Luckily, Erie County’s Fairview School District decided it had more to gain than to lose by hiring a teacher who could share that kind of experience with its students. He taught at Fairview High School from fall 2018 until he departed for South America in March 2019, then substitutes flled in for him until he returned after the Thanksgiving break.
Cole is happily back in his classroom now,
teaching Spanish l-lll, working with kids in Fairview’s theatre program, and advising the Students for Change club as it works to promote diversity and inclusion. Taking a page from Mercyhurst’s
playbook, he’s added a community service component to his curriculum. Later this spring, his students will participate in a naturalization ceremony at Erie’s federal courthouse. He’s been accepted for graduate work at Vermont’s Middlebury College, and he won’t rule out the possibility that he’ll one day want to teach at the college level. For now, though, he says he feels most relevant working with teenagers.
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