“I often tell people this is my dream job,” said Therese Milbrath, the new assistant superintendent of Catholic schools for the Diocese of Madison. “And it kind of is.”
Milbrath started her position on March 1.
“I am a product of Catholic education. My children are as well,” she said. “So, it has always been a dream of mine to work with and in Catholic schools. [But] as a special education teacher, you don’t necessarily know if that is going to be an option.”
Background in education
Milbrath attended Catholic schools from elementary schools through college, earning her bachelor’s degree from the University of Dallas, a small Catholic University in Texas. She then went on to earn her master’s degree in special education at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and is currently working on completing her doctoral work in educational leadership and management at Capella University.
After finishing her master’s degree, she took her first education job “teaching students who were deaf and hard of hearing,” she said.
She then “moved into the area of online education where I served as an intervention teacher and eventually went on to supervise and manage teachers under that umbrella.”
For the past four years, she’s been working with Catapult Learning which is a title provider.
“So again, I was working with intervention programs, coaching and supervising teachers, and then working with Catholic schools, helping to consult with them and decide how to best spend their title funding.”
She said the one thing she loves about taking the position with the diocese is the freedom to “embrace everything that I love about the Catholic Church and about Catholic schools. I walk into work every day just thinking how blessed I am to be here.”
The right opportunity at the right time
“There is a great story about how I heard about the job,” she said.
“I have been working on my doctorate for the past two years and have been preparing to start my final project. That’s all I have left to obtain my doctorate.”
Then the coronavirus put a halt to things.
“It looked like the research I was going to do with my previous employer was just not going to pan out, and I just kind of started looking around,” she said.
Since she lives in Milwaukee, she had never considered exploring opportunities that might be in Madison previously.
“The day I found out I wasn’t going to be able to continue my research, I just happened upon the Diocese of Madison [website], and [the job posting] was there,” she said. “So, it was just one of those timing things. I really do feel that it was providential.”
While she still currently resides in Milwaukee, she said that she and her husband hope to eventually move somewhere in between the two cities.
“You know, we make it work,” she said. “But getting up and having this kind of purpose is a great thing.”