Katie was one of the outstanding participants in the UTeach program, which enables students to gain a teaching certificate while earning a bachelor’s degree in math and science. She says she was surrounded in UTeach by “women who were really good at math and science.”

When Jesse De La Huerta started school in Brownsville, a border city on the southernmost tip of Texas, he did not speak English. He began his pre-kindergarten class as an English as Second Language student. But by his kindergarten year, his mother put him in all English classes. “She felt it was ‘sink or swim’ and wanted me to become full English speaking as quickly as possible rather than get stuck in the ESL classes,” he recalls now. “And she was right.”