Summit Educational Association

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Leadership

Ruth McGuire is the President of the Board of Summit Educational Association. Ruth is the mother of five children and has also served as President and Chairman of several boards of charitable organizations in the Milwaukee area.

Matt Smyczek is the Executive Director of Summit starting his third year. Matt comes from Chicago’s Midtown Educational Foundation’s (MEF) Midtown Center for Boys where he was the Director of the Center responsible for all programs for 4^th-12^th grade inner city boys in multiple mentoring and educational development programs for 6 years. Matt was the Program Director for the Walgreens One-on-One Mentoring program at Midtown for 7 years before being promoted to Director of the Center. Midtown provides the model for Summit and Matt brings this expertise to the Summit Educational Association. Matt was raised on the South Side of Milwaukee not far from Summit and attended Marquette University and the University of Wisconsin, Madison and has degrees in Engineering and Business.

Phyllis Gaggioli is the Girls Program Director starting her second year at Summit. She is the mother of seven children and has degrees in Education and Spanish from Marquette University, and has been teaching for 10 years. Phyllis is currently the Spanish teacher at St. John the Evangelist in Greenfield, WI.

Ben Potts is the Boys Program Director starting his first year at Summit. Ben most recently attained his Masters Degree inEducation at Harvard University. Previous to that he worked as a teacher in Madrid, Spain for a year and before that helped direct a program at the Midtown Center in Chicago. Ben's undergraduate degree is in History from the University of Chicago.

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“I am getting to know my mentor Dave. He tells me if I put my mind to my school work, I can be a very smart kid. Mentoring is good for you because you get better at what you are not good at, like literature. I had a U in it and since I have been coming here, I raised it to a C, and now I am going to try for an A. We also work on math. My goals are getting my homework done every night, and I am getting better at filling-out my assignment notebook.

- Tony Fontanez, 7th Grade Student