UMSL education alum Alexis Perez Lane recently completed a nine-month appointment as a public policy fellow with Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s office in Washington, D.C. (Photo courtesy of Alexis Perez Lane)
Alexis Perez Lane has always felt called to education. Her mother was a kindergarten and physical education teacher, and from a young age, Perez Lane knew she would eventually enter the profession.
After several years teaching elementary school in St. Louis Public Schools, Perez Lane realized her students were being affected by forces outside of the classroom that they couldn’t control, from health care to gun violence.
The experience motivated Perez Lane, who earned an MEd from the University of Missouri–St. Louis, to pursue the LEE’s Public Policy Fellowship to advocate for the students in SLPS and beyond. Last month, Perez Lane completed a nine-month appointment as a public policy fellow with Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s office in Washington, D.C.
“I think that it’s very important for the stories of my students to be represented in rooms that they don’t always get to go into,” she explained. “A lot of the ideas that come to me come from real world experience working with my kids and just wanting to advocate for them in a real, tangible way.”
Through the program, Perez Lane had the choice of serving in several congressional offices. She was drawn to Warren’s office because the senator is a former educator herself and seemed to go out of her way to seek the opinions of people affected by specific policies.
During the nine-month stint, Perez Lane worked on Warren’s education and oversight teams. Her work on the education team included research on educational policies and conversations with educators on the ground to make sure policy proposals are in line with what they need.
“I have been in charge of a lot of the K through 12 portfolio, making sure that I maintain contact, talking to partners, talking to the unions, talking to different organizations and making sure that the constituents are being heard,” she said. “I take a lot of constituent meetings. A lot of them are students that come in with their teachers, which is really cool. I’m grateful for the opportunity to still be connected to students in that way.”
One of the primary challenges Warren’s constituents in Massachusetts, and educators across the country, are facing is simply ensuring each school has the resources necessary for students to successfully learn. Perez Lane saw that dynamic firsthand in St. Louis.
“I know what’s going on, on the ground,” she said. “I’ve been in the trenches, in the classrooms. I know what teachers are saying when they’re talking about buying supplies out of their pocket.”
Perez Lane said her work on Capitol Hill was greatly informed not only by her time in SLPS, but also in the College of Education at UMSL. A native of Warner Robins, Georgia, she first earned her bachelor’s degree in human learning and development at Georgia State University.
She then decided to further her education at UMSL, where she began teaching in SLPS and working toward her master’s degree. She was impressed with the knowledgeable, passionate faculty members and the specialized certificates offered by the college. The move also afforded her the opportunity to explore another part of the country.
Perez Lane was also thankful for the guidance of her advisor, Lela Taussig, as she navigated challenges in the classroom. During her first year teaching at Ashland Elementary School, one of her students had a severe asthma attack at school and passed away two weeks later. Afterward, she moved to Monroe Elementary School, but tragedy followed her. She lost another student – this time to gun violence.
“The world of teaching is hard, but I think there are outside factors that really, really work against our kids and make it hard for them to come to school every day with a happy, positive attitude like we expect them to have,” she said. “I got into policy because I realized that there were those things that I couldn’t control for my kids, and I couldn’t fix for them. I could only do so much in the classroom, but I thought that I could tell their stories in a different place, that might help them a bit more and change things for the better.”
It spurred Perez Lane to earn her EdD in educational leadership at Spalding University and begin her public policy journey with the LEE Public Policy Fellowship. Now that the fellowship has concluded, she plans to return to St. Louis and leverage her experience working at the federal level. Ideally, she would like to find a position in child advocacy and also be involved with local school districts in some way.
She knows change is possible, and it starts with community building and lifting up the stories of those in need.
“I think really one of the biggest things is, if we can all learn to see other people’s kids as important as our own kids, then every kid would have what they’re entitled to,” Perez Lane said, “because I’m not going to let my kid not have what they deserve.”
