UF honors college's 2009 Outstanding Young Alumni
Posted April 20, 2009
A Lake Mary, Fla., fourth-grade teacher who combines class assignments with community service opportunities for her students, and a 2005 doctoral graduate who now oversees the College of Education’s critical accreditation process have been named the college’s 2009 Outstanding Young Alumni by the UF Alumni Association.
Education graduates Jamee Cagle Miller (BAE ’01, Med ’02) and Elayne Colon (MAE ’02, PhD ’05) received their awards April 18, along with recipients from other colleges, at UF’s Outstanding Young Alumni Awards Banquet. The UFAA established the award in 2006 to recognize alumni who are 35 or younger and have distinguished themselves in their profession and community.
Jamee Cagle Miller (BAE ’01, MEd ’02)
While Jamee Cagle Miller, a fourth-grade teacher and team leader at Crystal Lake Elementary School in Lake Mary, Fla., teaches with the Sunshine State Standards in mind, she believes teaching goes beyond textbooks. As she explains: “I must equip the students with life skills and street sense … and experiences they need to be successful in life.” Cagle makes it a practice to meet one-on-one with each of her students daily, yet also finds time to supervise junior and senior teaching interns. She recently created a social studies curriculum for the school’s entire fourth-grade program that combines reading assessment benchmarks in tandem with Florida history content.
She was named Seminole County 2008 Teacher of the Year, in part, for creating “Cagle’s Caring Crocs” under a $500 grant from the Golden Rule Foundation. The innovative project combines writing assignments with community service opportunities for her students to become role models in their community. She has also been featured as the Orlando Sentinel’s Teacher of the Week and chosen as Evans Elementary Teacher of the Month.
Cagle graduated summa cum laude for both of her elementary education degrees from UF: a bachelor’s in 2001 and a master’s in 2002.
Elayne Colon (MAE ’02, PhD ’05)
The College of Education didn’t have to look far before selecting Elayne Colón as a 2009 Outstanding Young Alumna. Just one year after receiving her doctorate in school psychology from UF, the College took notice of her extensive assessment background and hired her to head the its national, state and institutional accreditation efforts, including the arduous preparations for the upcoming 2010 accreditation visit and review by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE ) and the Department of Education.
Colón joined the education faculty in 2005, working as a psychoeducational consultant at UF’s Multidisciplinary Diagnostic and Training Program. The MDTP clinic was a collaborative effort between the colleges of Education and Medicine, serving the needs of children with learning and other developmental disabilities.
Her research interests include the assessment and remediation of students with learning disabilities, particularly related to difficulties in reading. Other work has focused on curriculum-based measurement, the response-to-intervention model of service delivery in the schools and program evaluation.
She has published journal articles in peer-refereed journals, including the Journal of Psychoeducational Assessment, and presented numerous papers at national and state conferences. She holds state and national certifications as a school psychologist.
