Utah Education Association president becomes head of national education organization

Friday, Aug. 29, 2014

SALT LAKE CITY — Lily Eskelsen Garcia will take office Sept. 1 as president of the more than 3.5 million-member National Education Association.

Garcia began her career in education as the salad girl in the school lunch program in Colorado Springs, Colo., where her husband, Ruel Eskelsen, was stationed in the Army. Within a year she became an aide to a special-education teacher, who encouraged her to go to college. 

Garcia’s husband Ruel Eskelsen died in 2011; she married Alberto Garcia in 2013.

Garcia and her husband, Ruel Eskelsen, moved back to Utah, where they had met in high school and she attended the University of Utah, graduating magna cum laude in elementary education. She later received a master’s degree in instructional technology. 

“Everything I know about what kids need I learned in the Utah classroom,” said Garcia, the mother of two sons, who taught at Orchard Elementary in West Valley for 10 years. “We tried to personalize and customize what it meant to serve those kids, even in my class of 39 fifth-graders. I wanted to involve parents and give them real details about how their kids were doing and what they could do to help them at home.” 

Garcia also taught children in a homeless shelter and those at the Christmas Box House. “These were special-needs kids who had nothing going for them except for someone trying to understand what was going on in the rest of their lives,” she said. “We tried to make their learning experience something meaningful to them, even if they were only going to be there a month or two.” 

Garcia is the daughter of Marcella [Chillie] Pace, a member of Saint John the Baptist Parish and an immigrant from Panama. 

“I’m proud of all six of my kids,” said Pace. “We encouraged them to do the best they could and to do what they wanted to do. They went to Catholic school until about third or fourth grade; we were a military family and moved a lot.”

When Garcia told her parents she was going to be a teacher, they thought that was “great,” Pace said, adding that her daughter is very dedicated to children. “Lily was always so quiet growing up, I don’t know how she got to be so outspoken.”

In 1989, Garcia was named Utah’s Teacher of the Year. 

In the classroom, Garcia always had an extraordinary capacity to tap into the needs of every child and put the children first, said Utah Education Association President Sharon Gallagher-Fishbaugh, a member of Saint Ambrose Parish. “Lily always made learning fun throughout her entire career including even today. The year she was Teacher of the Year, we had a full-day demonstration in Liberty Park about needing more money for public education. She was integral in that and very famous for singing a song she wrote, ‘The Utah Teacher Blues.’” 

In 1990 Garcia was elected UEA president, a position she held for 10 years, and she accomplished some remarkable things, said Gallagher-Fishbaugh. “One of them was the establishment of the UEA Children at Risk Foundation, a non-profit that targets at-risk schools and provides opportunities for grants to impact high-need students. I think Lily is going to be a very powerful voice for teachers and for the best practices in the classroom and for educators in public education across the country. Lily is bold, honest and knowledgeable.”

“I loved teaching; I felt empowered and I felt like parents really appreciated having someone who truly loved the whole child; they felt involved in their kids’ education,” said Garcia. “That made me want to go to the [Utah] Legislature and the governor for class-size reduction and for under-funding us and cutting programs. Utah schools have the highest class sizes in the country and the lowest per pupil expenditures. We balance our budget by putting more kids in the classroom.

“I wanted to be able to use my power as a citizen and explain to people who make policy decisions what it means to a teacher trying to do a good job,” Garcia added. “I had a lot of encouragement from my colleagues to pursue a position with the NEA. As long as I feel like I’m helping, I’m going to keep doing it.”