Teachers Open Up a World Unseen

May Stewart came to Notre Dame as an undergraduate three years ago after growing up in a sparse Louisiana landscape of, as she tells it, “plantations and churches.”

Thanks largely to ACE teachers at Ascension Catholic School in nearby Donaldsonville (population 7,000), her worldview and her sense of life’s possibilities grew, too. This prompted her to study at Notre Dame, May said—and to pursue an ACE internship preparing her to follow in her own teachers’ footsteps.

The junior, now earning a major in history and an Education, Schooling, and Society minor, wants to pass along her bolder, broader vision of hope and faith to the next generation. She’s already using extracurricular activities to exercise lessons she learned about compassion and service to those in need.

“I’m the evening child care coordinator at the Center for the Homeless downtown,” May said. “I feel like we students have a responsibility to the community of South Bend.”

Ascension Catholic, a preK-12 school located along the Mississippi River in the Diocese of Baton Rouge, helped build this awareness with help from ACE Teachers who have been commuting daily to the school for years from their home in Plaquemine, La.

May can recite a litany of ACE Teachers who changed her life, one-by-one, in different ways, spanning sixth grade through her senior year of high school.

“From early on, I clung to the ACE Teachers,” she said “I was always interested in meeting different people, and these teachers represented a world I didn’t ever get to see—until now.”

She encountered them as homeroom teachers and teachers of English and science, quiz-bowl leaders and sports coaches, or as confidants in after-school conversations about local, personal concerns or complex international issues. Such discussions were rare in this low-income area, in which few residents ever dreamed of colleges or jobs outside Louisiana, May said.

By seventh grade, May had made her college decision.

“I decided I was going to go to Notre Dame,” May said. “[One of my teachers was] very deep in her faith and incredibly smart, and I said, ‘that’s what I want to be.’ She was always so encouraging. All the ACE Teachers were just so excited to be in the classroom.”

ACE Teachers helped her in numerous ways, from transforming her writing to helping her plan her future.

“[One teacher] reassured me and encouraged me that I could actually go to Notre Dame, that this was a thing that actually could happen.”

Choir practices in the chapel allowed May to see one ACE Teacher regularly enter a pew and pray, a teacher who has now gone on to study for the priesthood.

“[ACE Teachers] emphasized the Catholic part of my education. I tried to emulate how important faith was to my ACE Teachers. It had to be what made them so awesome. I saw the value of the ACE Teachers to my school, as well as how much they influenced my life. That’s such a beautiful thing, and it’s something I would want to give to someone else in some capacity.”

The next plan comes naturally. May said she definitely wants to apply to be a part of ACE Teaching Fellows, perhaps starting with an internship during her senior year.

Is she concerned about where in the country she might be assigned if she were accepted? No, because an ACE Teacher at Ascension once addressed her fears that Notre Dame might not accept her application.

“She told me that God has a greater plan to find the right fit for me,” May said. “It’s not really about my plan all the time.”