Juan Sepulveda, executive director of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanic Americans, delivered the keynote address, thanking the Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE) graduates for serving as educators in under-resourced Catholic schools “at a very critical time for us a country” when all children must be globally competitive.

He urged the educators to be innovative, asking themselves, “How can I create schools that maybe haven’t even existed before, because that’s what it’s going to take for our kids to be successful.”

The graduates comprised 81 members of ACE’s “Service through Teaching” class, which prepares young adults as teachers in Catholic schools around the country, as well as the latest 25-member class from ACE’s Mary Ann Remick Leadership Program, focused on the formation of Catholic school principals.

Since its inception some 18 years ago, the ACE Service through Teaching program has grown from a service initiative composed of a handful of Catholic school educators to a movement that has commissioned 1,400 teachers to serve Catholic schools throughout the United States. The Mary Ann Remick Leadership Program has prepared more than 170 educators now serving as school leaders in 41 states.