April Torrence Ph.D. ‘15

Meet April Torrence D‘15, an RMU alum and recipient of the 2024 Voice for Children Award from the Pennsylvania Association for the Education of Young Children. April earned her Doctorate in Instructional Management and Leadership from Robert Morris in 2015. 

The Farrell, PA native described her experience at the University as invaluable. She believes this is where she learned about the field of education, public school funding, and educational law, topics she was never exposed to or instructed on prior to coming to RMU. 

“I was a business major in my undergraduate and graduate work, so getting into the education sector was eye-opening and was something that I needed to continue to run my non-profit early-learning facility in Mercer County.”

April is the founder of the Zion Education Center in Farrell, PA. The non-profit is the only licensed child care center in Mercer County providing free early learning classrooms, childcare, home visits, and a crisis response network for children ages 1-5. They also provide free nutritional meals available on weekdays and during summer break that are governed by USDA.

“It will be 30 years in March. We prepare our students to transition to Kindergarten–ready to learn and ready to excel. It’s a blessing to be able to give back to the community the gift of education…so that hardship doesn’t fall on the child or parent(s).”

The Zion Education Center offers additional services for students ages 6-18 through their after school hot meals and snacks sponsorship. April said she often applies the research she conducted while earning her doctorate at RMU into her grant proposals.

The center recently received a $100,000 grant to expand their social service outreach to groups who have experienced some sort of traumatic event in their early years or an adverse childhood experience. The “rapid response team”, as she called it, matches social service workers and the family resource and community resource specialists with students and families. They were able to receive approval to expand services into two other Counties, now serving Mercer, Venango, and Crawford County.

Through another grant, the Zion Center will be adding a greenhouse to the property, giving them an opportunity to grow their own vegetables and use them as part of the on-site child nutrition program. They are also in the process of buying another home directly next door to be able to start a full nursery for newborns.

Another one of the many projects April and her team recently completed was fully renovating a shipping container into an alternative learning space for children, funded by the PNC Foundation’s Grow Up Great grant. 

The former shipping container is now an outdoor literacy classroom. “We opened it in January 2024 and it is licensed for three students at a time to go outside of the building to go inside the container for literacy experiences.” It was nicknamed “Nali Kali”, which translates to “Joyful Learning”.

“Overall, my leadership style is ‘servant leadership’ and I’ve always been more committed to the outcomes as opposed to the incomes,” said Torrence. “I’ve made some tremendous sacrifices over the last 30 years to make sure that my team and my staff are compensated in a competitive way to retain them and I’m just happy to have a team of committed workers who are all about transforming our students.”

April has been honored for her incredible work with numerous awards in the last year. She was named the 2024 Voice for Children Award recipient from the Pennsylvania Association for the Education of Young Children and was nominated by Former State Representative Mark Longietti for the Congressional Award, which is the only statewide award in PA recognizing the grassroots leaders whose work impacts the quality of care for young children in diverse settings.