Lily Eskelsen

Lily Eskelsen, an elementary teacher from Utah, is Secretary-Treasurer of the 2.7 million member National Education Association. Lily is a former "Army Brat". Her parents met in Panama, where her mother was born and raised and her father was stationed as a young soldier. She grew up in Texas, Georgia, Washington, Alaska, Colorado and Utah. She began her career as a school lunch worker and later a teacher's aide, working with a kindergarten teacher who encouraged her go to college and become a teacher herself. She worked her way through college by folk singing with her husband, Ruel, and graduated magna cum laude in elementary education in 1980, and later earned a master's degree in instructional technology from the University of Utah. Lily taught fourth, fifth and sixth grades for nine years before being named Utah Teacher of the Year in 1989. In 1990, she won a write-in election as president of the 20,000 member Utah Education Association, her first elected position in the Association. She authored a weekly column on parenting that ran in 22 local newspapers. Her advice to parents has appeared in Working Mother Magazine, Woman's Day and Time. She organized and headed The Children at Risk Foundation for ten years, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars from business partners to help disadvantaged students and secured funding from the Utah Jazz for scholarships for minority and bilingual high school seniors wishing to become teachers. Lily is the past chair of the Utah State Retirement System. She served on the Utah La Raza Education Committee, the Homeless Children's Foundation advisory board, and the National Council of Senior Citizens. In 1998, she was chosen her party's nominee for U.S. Congress. She has been honored as the PTA Friend of Education, the Utah Communicator the Year, and the recipient of the Charles Bennett Human & Civil Rights Award. Lily Eskelsen has been the invited keynote to literally hundreds of educational events across the country. She brings her perspective of true-life classroom adventures to a message of pride in the teaching profession and compassion in reaching out to all children - the lessons she learned as a teacher at Salt Lake City's homeless Shelter and the Christmas Box House Children's Shelter, a kindergarten through 6th grade one-room public school serving hard-to-place foster children in Salt Lake City. Lily and her husband live in Washington, D.C. and use all their frequent flyer tickets to visit their grown-up sons and grandchildren who live in Utah.