A special inspiration: Louie Moore is doing more than simply giving back to the school that gave him his education. He offers the students there an inspiring example to follow.

Huston, Pat

A 1996 graduate of the Teaching Professions Program at Collinwood High School in Cleveland, Ohio, Louie L. Moore today is giving back to his alma mater as a special education teacher and junior varsity basketball coach.

As a high school senior, Moore applied academic and career-technical curricula into his own lessons for students in an eight-week, student teaching internship. He had his first teaching experience in an urban third-grade classroom at Kenneth Clement Elementary School.

In 2000, Moore received his bachelor's degree in sports management and marketing from Slippery Rock University. After serving in an internship position in marketing and promotions with the South Bend Silver Hawks, a Class-A minor league baseball team, he made the decision to return to his first love--teaching.

Moore worked in a special education position at Central Middle School (now Louis Stokes Middle School) and as a substitute teacher with the Cleveland Municipal School District while attending graduate school at Cleveland State University. He also taught ninth-grade English prior to his assignment to teach mathematics and English classes.

In addition to his teaching duties, Moore has successfully taken on the added challenge of bringing up the grade-point average of the athletes on the basketball team he coaches.

"I want to teach and inspire students at my alma mater," he says.

Moore was recently recognized by the Ohio Department of Education's Office of Career-Technical and Adult Education as one of its success stories. He represents the education and training career field.

Moore is scheduled to be among the presenters at the 50th annual Ohio School Boards Association (OSBA) Capital Conference, which will be held November 13-16 in Columbus, Ohio. The topic of his presentation is "Growing the Next Generation of Ohio Teachers." For the past three years, attendance at the OSBA conference has been more than 10,000--making the event one of the nation's largest education association conferences.

So it seems that Louis Moore will soon have a much wider audience for his message of teaching and inspiration, and will be bringing additional attention to the benefits offered by career and technical education.

"Spotlight" focuses on career and technical education success stories. If you have a success story you would like to submit, or if you would like to recommend a student, former student or colleague to be featured in Spotlight, please contact Susan Reese at susan@ printmanagementinc.com, or by telephone at 703-521-7760.

Pat Huston is the manager of products and customer services for the Office of Career-Technical and Adult Education at the Ohio Department of Education. She can be contacted at Pat.HustonHolm@ode. state.oh.us.