Laura Valdez, 21

By Mary Erpenbach

Laura Valdez gained some unusual experience on her way to becoming a teacher. As a youngster she helped her dad, a program manager with Hamilton Sundstrand, promote space-flight awareness in Rockford schools – by accompanying him to classrooms dressed in a nine-foot-tall, inflatable astronaut costume.

Valdez laughs when asked if she used the costume as a prop during her recent stint as a student teacher at Jefferson Middle School in Champaign.

“I think ‘The Suit’ is back down at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida,” she said.

As she grew up, Valdez remained game for helping friends and family with their causes. She volunteered at the YMCA and for Special Olympics, coached gymnastics, and helped raise funds for Huntington’s Disease research, all before her 2005 graduation from Boylan High School.

Two years later, a college internship with Rockford Mayor Larry Morrissey’s office led her to create curriculum for an eight-week leadership course for members of the Mayor’s Youth Advisory Council. She also worked with city leaders and the Salvation Army to help create the nCenter for teens and secured $1.2 million in financial and in-kind funding.

Then she served as the center’s first program director.

Earlier this year Valdez earned her degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and returned home to Rockford to look for her ideal job – teaching middle or high school English. “Rockford is undergoing some exciting changes,” she said, “and I like being in the middle of change.”