Elect Lily For NEA Vice President

LILY ESKELSEN
Candidate for NEA Vice President
National Education Association

LILY ESKELSEN is an elementary teacher from Utah and is the current NEA Secretary-Treasurer.

Lily is a proud “Army Brat” who grew up in Texas, Georgia, Washington, Alaska, Colorado and Utah. Her mother is from Panama and met her father there when he was a young soldier stationed on the Canal Zone.

She began her career in education as a school lunch lady in charge of salads and dishwashing and then as a kindergarten aide. Lily would bring her guitar to sing for the kids, and the kindergarten teacher was impressed enough to encourage her to go to college and become a teacher herself.

Lily and her husband, Ruel, had been married for four years when they devised a way to make that happen with a combination of student loans, scholarships and weekend folk singing at pizza parlors and bars. She graduated magna cum laude in elementary education in 1980 and later earned a master’s degree in instructional technology, both from the University of Utah. Lily taught fourth, fifth and sixth grades at Orchard Elementary School for nine years before being named Utah Teacher of the Year in 1989.

The following year 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 humor 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 was president of the Children at Risk Foundation for ten years, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars from business partners to help disadvantaged students – She recommended one of her scholarship winners to the Rosie O'Donnell show which resulted in Vietnamese refugee Lieu Tran being interviewed on Rosie's show and being given a $75,000 education trust fund for college. She personally secured funding from the Utah Jazz basketball team for scholarships for minority and bilingual high school seniors wishing to become teachers.

Lily’s advocacy for educators includes her service as president of the Utah State Retirement system, only the second woman to serve in that capacity. She has served on the Utah La Raza Education Committee, The Homeless Children’s Foundation Advisory Board, the National Council of Senior Citizens and the National Conference for Community & Justice. In 1998, she was chosen her party’s nominee for U.S. Congress.

After serving as UEA President, Lily continued her classroom career as a teacher at the Salt Lake City Homeless Shelter School and the Christmas Box House Children’s Shelter, a one-room K-6 public school serving hard-to-place foster children in protective custody.

She has been honored as the PTA Friend of Education, The Utah Business Communicator of the Year, and is the recipient of The Charles Bennett Human & Civil Rights Award and The Carol Stowe Humanitarian Award.

Lily has been the invited keynote to literally hundreds of educational events in every state. She’s been interviewed on Fox’s Hannity & Colmes, CNN’s Lou Dobbs Tonight and was highlighted in Education World’s “Best Conference Speakers” edition. She brings her perspective of true-life classroom adventures to a message of pride in the teaching profession, respect for all those who work in education and compassion in reaching out to all students and making our schools a place where they are welcome and find what they need to build their futures.

Lily and Ruel Eskelsen now live in Washington, D.C. where Ruel is a librarian for the D.C. Historical Society and Lily serves as NEA Secretary Treasurer. They have two grown sons and two darling grandchildren who live in Utah.