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Outstanding Community Service Award: Jana Noel

Urban schools deal with a multitude of challenges—poverty, inadequate funding for social and health needs of children and their families and high teacher turnover.

Teacher education professor Jana Noel was one of a group of faculty and administrators from Sacramento State and the Sacramento City Unified School District who created the Urban Teacher Education Center (UTEC) in 2004. The Center was established in Jedediah Smith School, located in an area with children from two public housing projects. “The focus of the program is teacher preparation to prepare future educators for urban schools and communities,” Noel says.

The UTEC location was not picked by accident. “The Center is located in one of the lowest-income areas in Sacramento,” Noel says. “That’s where kids need teachers. It’s a challenge and it takes a lot of commitment. It’s common for teachers in low-income schools to move to high-income schools where there are more resources.”

One of the activities was the creation of the Family Resource Center created by Noel and UTEC student teachers. “There was an old kindergarten classroom that wasn’t being used,” Noel says. “We had an open house, served coffee to the parents, helped them with computer access and had a children’s book give-away section.” The center now serves as a classroom for parent education including a parenting workshop held by Sacramento State and a GED course offered by the Sac City Unified School District.

Noel also spent her sabbatical in the fall of 2006 as a community liaison between Jed Smith School, the community and the university. “I worked to try to create better connections between them, because sometimes there may be distrust between schools and low-income communities,” she says.

“I was a complete outsider in the beginning, but I got to know some parents and eventually was welcomed into the neighborhood by some wonderful families,” Noel says.

“We all learned from each other. It was a shared educational experience.”

Noel now serves as co-coordinator of UTEC and as the CSUS community engagement scholar out of the Community Engagement Center.