Maria Socorro Chavez Gomez de Leslie is currently an ESL teacher at Reynolds Middle School in Fairview. Maria entered the BTP Program in the Fall of 1999 in the first cohort. At that time, Maria was an instructional assistant in a high school and had been in that position for five years. Maria was born in the state of Jalisco in Mexico. She received all of her education in Guadalajara including her university work which prepared her to teach in Mexico. As is the custom in Mexico, Maria was sent by the federal government to work where she was needed which was in a rural school for her first year of teaching. She taught third grade. The community she taught in was very isolated.

After immigrating to the U.S., Maria worked for local companies in jobs such as a mail messenger in order to become acculturated and learn English. She missed working with children and decided to return to working in schools as an instructional assistant even though this meant a pay cut and she was supporting her own children. She began as an instructional assistant in special education in the Reynolds School District and then became an instructional assistant in the English as a Second Language Program. She read about a new program at Portland State University, the Bilingual Teacher Pathway Program, that was beginning that year targeting bilingual/bicultural instructional assistants already working in local schools. Her school district supported her in this endeavor and she is now the ESL teacher at Reynolds Middle School. She realized her dream by remembering that, “Winners never quit!”