Current Role: Program Officer in the Office of the President, W.K. Kellogg Foundation (Battle Creek, MI)
Fellowship Role: Deputy Director, Options for Parents and Families Division, New Mexico Public Education Department (Santa Fe, NM)
Dr. Icela Pelayo serves as a Program Officer at W.K. Kellogg Foundation.
During the Fellowship, Icela was Deputy Director of the Options for Parents and Families Division at PED, where she oversaw charter school authorizing processes and practices and led the team in providing technical assistance and support to and evaluating the performance of state-authorized charter schools across NM. Previously, Icela served as PED’s bilingual multicultural education director. In that role, she directed the Academic Language Development for All (ALD4ALL) project, providing educator trainings on the academic language learning needs of English Learners and culturally and linguistically diverse students participating in bilingual multicultural education programs. ALD4ALL successfully demonstrated the value of job-embedded professional learning, resulting in 70% of participating teachers improving their effectiveness by one or two levels and/or maintaining a rating of effective or higher.
Icela earned her Ph.D. from the University of Southern California in urban education policy, K–12 policy and practice. She focused specifically on the intersection of policy, instruction, and learning of ELs, especially related to culturally and linguistically responsive instruction, educator quality, and professional development. She earned her M.A. in elementary education from Loyola Marymount University while serving as a public school teacher of CLD and EL students in South Los Angeles. She earned a B.A. in political economy and Spanish literature from the University of California, Berkeley.