Dave Childers – Executive Director/Principal

dchilders@acelfresno.org

Dave comes to ACEL with over 11 years of experience in public education, including time as an administrator with the Fresno Unified School District.

Dave was born in Fresno and spent almost his entire youth in Madera, graduating from Madera High School in 1993.  From there he attended the University of Southern California as a broadcast journalism major before transferring back home to Fresno State in 1996.

When he moved back to the area, Dave took a part-time job as a library/computer lab assistant at Lincoln Elementary in Madera. His experiences working with students were so overwhelmingly positive that he changed his major to Liberal Studies to become a classroom teacher.

Dave completed his degree in Liberal Studies in 1998, becoming the first member of his family to graduate from college.  From there he enrolled in Fresno State’s Block A credentialing program, an accelerated cohort that allowed him to study off campus in an actual school setting.

Dave’s first teaching position was at Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School in Madera, where he began teaching 7th grade Language Arts and Social Studies.  In his third year teaching he added an elective to his schedule – Video Production – where his students produced the daily news announcements on the school’s closed-circuit television system and created other video projects.  He also coached softball, tennis, basketball and baseball and served as an academic coach, EETT grant lead, and one year as the advisor of the school’s Asian Club.

After six years at King, Dave was chosen to be a part of the leadership team that opened Jack G. Desmond Middle School in Madera in September of 2005. He served as the school’s Technology Coordinator and taught Video Production, Computer Literacy, and Careers Awareness. At Desmond he also served as the first School Site Council President, coached track, was a BTSA mentor teacher and advised the school’s Technology Club. In the Spring of 2007 his students submitted their first-ever entries to the Slick Rock Student Film Festival in Visalia, taking home two of the five prizes in the Middle School division and producing a finalist in a third category.

In late 2007, after completing his administrative credential and receiving his Master’s Degree in Curriculum and Instruction – Educational Technology from Grand Canyon University, Dave was hired as Vice Principal/Program Manager at Rowell Elementary School in Fresno.  He served in that position up until accepting the offer to become the founding principal at ACEL in December of 2008.

Dave teaches Curriculum and Instruction part time at Fresno State and served two years as the President of Central Valley Computer-Using Educators (CVCUE), a local non-profit organization that works to increase technology integration in classrooms. He was a member of Leadership Fresno’s Class 26 and was named to the 2009 “40 Under 40″ list of Fresno professionals by Business Street Magazine and the Fresno Grizzlies.  He is also a member of the State Center Consortium Board, TICAL, and Creative Fresno.