The Scholarship Reception hosted by TC President Arthur Levine was especially upbeat and joyful. "It's a very special time," he said welcoming his guests. "It's a time when we get students and the people who make it possible for them to come here together."

The College has made increasing scholarship and fellowship aid for students a top priority in the upcoming Capital Campaign. Levine explained: "We need to do better for the people who would like to attend this school but who can't afford to attend."

One of the speakers at the reception-Elihu Rose-is one of those people who make it possible for some of the nation's brightest students to come to Teachers College.

Rose, an honorary TC Trustee, is a board member of New York City's Public Television station WNET. The station has a Teacher Training Institute, which works with teachers on various distance learning programs, and Rose thought it made sense to link that program with the College.

"One day I said to the board at WNET that Channel 13 trains teachers and Teachers College, just 50 blocks north of here, trains teachers," he recalled. "You can't tell me there isn't a point of contact, some tangential point in which each institution can do something good for each other."

Initially he started an internship program at WNET for TC students. Later, Rose decided to replicate the idea with TC students working in a wide range of educational institutions.

One of the Rose Fellows who spoke at the reception-Lee Taylor Nelms-was so excited about her experience that she brought her mother, a former school principal, to the event.
Nelms explained that the fellowship allows her to invest in her own education without completely sacrificing the investment she needs to make to finance her young son's future schooling.

Nelms is a doctoral student in the Communication, Computing and Technology in Education program. As a Rose Fellow, she is working at Channel 13's wNETSchool program, which is a Web-based service for K-12 teachers to help them make practical use of the Internet and the Web. Being a Rose Fellow "means I can work in my future career field at a time when I didn't really think I could have it all," she said.

Another Rose Follow, Christine Werthmann, is interning at the Reading Reform Foundation of New York (RRF). This influential non-profit foundation trains teachers in urban schools to deliver reading instruction and is also attempting to do the same at the undergraduate level. As a Rose Fellow, Werthmann, who is studying for an Ed.M. in Reading and Learning Disabilities, is surveying all the undergraduate programs in the New York metropolitan area to find out which courses are taught in the reading area. The aim of the exercise is to determine the kind of pilot program that colleges may offer students enrolled in elementary education programs.

Dolores Perin, Associate Professor of Psychology and Education, is Werthmann's advisor, and said that her student has been able to garner a "world of experience" from the fellowship.

Terry Marx, who is also a Rose Fellow, has spent more than 20 years in the financial printing world before coming to TC to work on her degree in Computing and Education with the Co-Directors of TC's Institute for Learning Technologies, Professors Robert McClintock and Frank Moretti. She wants to integrate computers and technology into the curriculum. Marx said: "Technology has not yet become a tool in education and I look forward to making it as accessible as writing your name on the blackboard."

Marx is an intern at the Center for Educational Innovation (CEI), which impacts public education primarily through the distribution of private funds. She said that it is an excellent avenue for her to express her interest in public policy while sustaining her desire to continue a "hands on" relationship with schools.

Marx is working on a staff development project with a network of middle school administrators. In another project, she is helping to develop a "model' of technology for a high school in Queens, New York, in conjunction with Citicorp.

Rose told the guests at the Scholarship Reception: "As a donor, I feel this program is twice blessed. Those institutions are getting first-class students. And it is blessed because the students get a chance to get their hands dirty. You can't imagine the satisfaction that I get."

Published Tuesday, Sep. 18, 2001