Amy Aparicio Clark

Project Director

Center for Family, School, and Community (FSC)

Born in Lima, Peru, Amy Aparicio Clark began her career as a middle school Spanish teacher. Currently, Clark directs PALMS, or Postsecondary Access for Latino Middle-Grades Students, a project funded by Lumina Foundation for Education that aims to improve students’ opportunities for higher education. At EDC since 1999, Clark has worked on several projects with a middle-grades focus, including the National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform. She is dedicated to developing programs and creating materials that are not only research-based, but are useful and relevant to the daily lives of educators.

What led you to work at EDC?

I started out as a Spanish and dual-language teacher in a public middle school in Framingham (Massachusetts) and even though I enjoyed the interaction I had with my students, I didn’t have many opportunities to interact or collaborate with my colleagues. This started to wear on me, and I decided to look at other options. I found a job at an international non-profit health organization that required fluency in Spanish. People there were very passionate about ending health disparities, and I loved working with people from around the world, particularly Latin America. It was a good fit for me for a while, but I eventually realized that my real passion was education.

I looked at the EDC Web site, and the kinds of work that EDC is involved in, and saw an opening on a middle school project. It seemed like the right place for me.

What projects have you worked on?

I started at EDC on a project called the Four Sites Study. I was visiting four school districts around the country who had received a lot of funding to make standards-based reforms in their middle schools. The project’s funder wanted to collect materials that districts had developed and find a way to share them. We found a collaborator with similar goals, and we worked together to share these materials through their Web site.

From there I moved onto managing Schools to Watch, a program of the National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform. My work included documenting the practices of a high-performing middle grades school in Chicago and helping several states across the country replicate the Schools to Watch program. During this time, I also worked on writing a guide to help middle school teachers choose social studies curriculum. I’ve also documented and helped publicize the work of another EDC project, AIM at Middle-Grades Results.

While I was with the Forum, we developed a proposal to Lumina Foundation to create resources for schools and communities aimed at increasing opportunities for Latino students to get into college. That was the PALMS project that I direct now.

What do you enjoy about the work you do now?

The work I’m doing has such a direct connection to what I value strongly—finding ways to get students to continue their education. The more we do, the more we see the need for what we’re doing.

Can you give me an example?

Immigrant families from Mexico are drawn to states like Arkansas and North Carolina for jobs in the poultry and meatpacking industries. Arkansas has seen more than a 400 percent increase in their Latino population. A lot of children are arriving that don’t have language skills. The younger ones have more support and a longer time to learn English. But middle schools often don’t have supports for newly-immigrated children. Those children are at risk of falling behind and never catching up. Do we want to see kids dropping out, becoming 2nd generation poultry workers? Families want more for their children.

PALMS can help address their needs—working to bridge the distance between families and schools. We can help schools be more aware of the culture and language shock that families experience, giving them tools to address those issues, and improve Latino students’ opportunities to do well and improve their chances for higher education.

Is there a situation that stands out for you, that was particularly exciting about the work you do?

I was at a conference presenting the findings of a parent outreach study that we conducted as part of PALMS. There were about 40 school teams from around the country, mostly principals, assistant principals, teachers, and ESL Coordinators from states that were running the Schools to Watch program. I was leading a session on how to engage Latino parents, and the response was so positive and appreciative. It was a great feeling to be face to face with my target audience, to be giving them information they could really use. There was a feeling, for me, of real coherence and connectedness with my past and present work. It was a unique moment.

How has EDC supported you in your work?

From the very beginning, I’ve found a really good balance between nurturing and the freedom to take risks. I have been allowed to try different things, and the message I have always gotten from my colleagues is, ‘you can do it.’

And there is so much collaboration. I find that always makes my thinking better. For example, I always like to try to run my writing by an internal group of reviewers, because they always help me find some nuance, something I hadn’t thought of. At EDC, it’s the norm to be collaborative, and when I arrived here, that’s how I knew I was in the right place. I no longer had that feeling of isolation that I experienced as a teacher. It was a welcome change for me. I can’t think of another place I’d rather work.

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“Middle schools often don’t have supports for newly-immigrated children. Those children are at risk of falling behind and never catching up.”

“The work I’m doing has such a direct connection to what I value strongly—finding ways to get students to continue their education. The more we do, the more we see the need for what we’re doing.”