College of Charleston senior education fellow Terry Peterson is one of the namesakes of the newly established White-Riley-Peterson Policy Fellowship designed to develop national policy leaders for afterschool and expanded learning opportunities. Dr. Terry Peterson is the national board chair with the Afterschool Alliance and has spent decades working in service of afterschool, education reform and the children, schools and communities that benefit in South Carolina and across America. In 2010, Peterson received the C.S. Mott Foundation’s prestigious national William S. White Achievement Award.
The White-Riley-Peterson Policy Fellowship will allow 15 leaders in the afterschool and expanded learning fields nationwide to undergo 10 months of specialized policy training. This is a result of a new partnership between The Riley Institute at Furman University and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, which gave a $200,000 grant for the creation of the fellowships. White-Riley-Peterson Policy Fellows will spend a week on Furman’s campus during October 2012 in an intensive workshop before returning home to create a policy plan that addresses the opportunities and challenges facing their state’s afterschool and expanded learning communities. Throughout the year, Fellows will also participate in a series of online sessions and small-group conferences before presenting their individual policy plans in the spring of 2013.
The fellowship is named for William S. White, president and CEO of the Mott Foundation; Richard W. Riley, former South Carolina Governor and U.S. Secretary of Education under President Clinton; and Peterson.
“Providing more quality afterschool and summer learning opportunities for our young people is one good way to help more of them catch up, keep up and get ahead,” Peterson said. “We need more young leaders at all levels across America to be able to design these policies so that they work well for local children and families.”
Peterson is one of only a handful of people who for eight years each has been both the top education advisor to the U.S. Secretary of Education and to a governor. At the U.S. Department of Education, he helped design and lead, for U.S. Secretary of Education Richard W. Riley, a number of major national initiatives ranging from reading to college access and from the 21st Century Community Learning Centers to the Partnership for Family Involvement. He worked on the startup of GEAR-UP, the E-rate, the school modernization proposal and Advanced Placement expansion. He also helped co-found the Arts Education Partnership, the Read*Write*Now campaign, the Pathways to College Network, International Education Week and the America Goes Back to School campaign. With his involvement and the support of many other people, the 21st Century Community Learning Centers initiative grew from serving approximately 1,000 children in afterschool and summer program in 10 schools with a $1 million federal appropriation in 1998 to serving more than 1,000,000 children and an equal number of families in almost 10,000 school-community partnerships with an appropriation of more than $1.1 billion in 2010.
As director of education in the South Carolina governor’s office, Peterson oversaw issues from preschool to medical education. He was the lead staff person for a widely praised statewide $2 billion, 7-year education improvement package that included early childhood initiatives; a statewide teacher recruitment center; gifted programs for academically and artistically talented students; expansion of Advance Placement course availability and accessibility; school, principal and teacher performance pay programs; innovation funds for teachers and schools; new education accountability systems; and the arts in the basic curriculum.
