Bill Brent
Department of Energy
Capitol Hill, Office of Senator Mark Hatfield (R-OR)
1992-93
Bill says there are three areas of his Fellowship that are most memorable. One is the work he did to protect the math-science priority of the Eisenhower program within the ESEA Act of 1994, including a $350 million allocation. The program was under attack in Congress due to inaccurate information and invalid evaluations being disseminated at the time. Bill had to track down the sources of this misinformation so that Senator Hatfield could counteract those sources among his colleagues. A second area was drafting the legislation to get the Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Program authorized. This was particularly problematic since the Department of Education was unwilling to accept the program at that time, but Bill was able to get the Department of Energy to take it on. He put together the hearing for the bill his last month in Washington. The third major issue area was writing position papers and speeches for Senator Hatfield on Goals 2000. At the conclusion of his Fellowship, Bill worked with a school district to implement provisions of Goals 2000 as proposed by Missouri, and then began work on his PhD in Science Education. He completed his PhD in 1998 and then taught at the University of Missouri for a year, moving on to teach at Stephens College for six more. He received the High Flyer Award from students in the Education Department at MU in 1998 and the Missouri Science Educator of the Year award in 2001. He retired as a science education consultant for Missouri school districts under the SuccessLink Program in 2007 and moved to Florida where he occasionally conducts a science workshop. He and his wife served as volunteers in the U.S. Forest Service at Flaming Gorge Recreation Area in Utah for the summers of 2008 and 2009 and currently they travel extensively. He says the greatest benefit of the Fellowship was to see “the significant number of teachers that availed themselves of professional development opportunities from the provisions in the Eisenhower program that I wrote with Hatfield’s powerful support. I was on a Board that sponsored workshops for science teachers. Thousands of teachers took part that otherwise would not have been able to do so. I was also very pleased to see 13 teachers get funded for the Einstein program the year following my experience. The year I was a Fellow only two teachers were funded and I had to wait three months before I received any funds.”
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