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Center for Catholic Education at UD

From Service to Success via Lalanne

By Jacinta Mergler and Aimee Vogt

Lalanne is a teacher service program in the Marianist tradition sponsored by the Center for Catholic Education at the University of Dayton.  Lalanne provides education majors graduating from college with the opportunity to experience teaching as ministry.  Lalanne teachers make a two year commitment to serve in under-resourced Catholic schools K-12.  Teachers live together in community for a supportive environment that fosters personal, professional, and spiritual development in order to make a positive impact on the lives of the students they teach. While in Lalanne teachers earn a Master’s degree from UD.  To date over 170 young men and women have chosen to begin their teaching careers in Lalanne -- 88% still remain in education, 85% of those work in Catholic Schools. We recently heard from one of our graduates, Aimee Vogt (Lalanne 2002-2004), who gave us an update on what she's been doing since her time in Lalanne. 

My name is Aimee Vogt and I taught at my Lalanne school, St. Michael the Archangel, for two additional years after Lalanne. After four years in Indianapolis, I decided to move back home to St. Louis. In 2006, I began teaching at Hixson Middle School as a reading specialist. I taught seventh and eighth graders who struggled with reading.  Jen (Zielonko) Shaughnessy, a fellow Indy Lalanne teacher, joined me at Hixson in 2011 as a reading specialist.  For four years we shared a classroom and countless conversations about how we could best support our students.

In 2013, I shifted my focus to supporting teachers as the Building Literacy and RTI Facilitator at Hixson. In this position, I was responsible for monitoring the progress of students receiving interventions and provide coaching to teachers as they work to support students in their classrooms. In December of 2014, I earned my doctoral degree in Educational Administration from Maryville University. In 2016, I began serving as an Assistant Principal of Hixson Middle School.  This has been a year of much learning and I'm excited to continue my work in school administration.

Edited by Barb Miller and Ben Swick
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