Board of Directors

Meet our Board of Directors for the 2008-2010 term.

Ben Boyington

Ben Boyington is a high school teacher working in Windsor, Vermont. Before becoming a teacher, he worked as a book and magazine editor and an independent film producer. He was also active in multimedia services in the mid-1990s. Since becoming a teacher eight years ago, he has pioneered both media studies and film studies at his high school. For the action research component of his master's work, Ben tested the use of essential questions in the culminating project for his media course, in which students work in groups to research a media controversy and teach that controversy to their peers in a lesson built around a media production. Ben is continually seeking new ways to bring new media studies and tools into his practice. He has also been instrumental in the development of an electronic portfolio pilot for his high school this year.

Jacques Brodeur

Jacques Brodeur has 30 years experience as a physical education teacher. In 1986, U.N. International Year for Peace, he collected thousands of war toys in 13 schools and recycled them to build a monument for Peace. That was one decade after advertising to kids became illegal in the first jurisdiction of North America: the Province of Québec. In 1990, he became founding member of TROP (Time to React to Outrageous Programming). The same year, he created the YOUTH VOTE, an empowering approach to increase students' critical viewing skills and promote media education free from the industry. In 2001, after retiring from teaching, he became a consultant, speaker and trainer with Edupax to help schools prevent youth violence through media education. In October 2002, he was elected Board Member of the newly born Action Coalition for Media Education. In April 2003, he created the 10 DAY TV & VIDEO GAME FREE CHALLENGE with the partnership of the parents association of Québec City. Since then, well over a hundred schools have experienced the SCREEN-FREE CHALLENGE. In 2008, he started training teachers & principals from France to help them organise the 10-DAY SCREEN-FREE CHALLENGE in their schools. In 2009, he was hosted in 7 cities of France to promote the 10 DAY SCREEN-FREE CHALLENGE. In May 2011, he will launch the 2nd Conference on the the IMPACTS OF SCREEN OVEREXPOSURE ON YOUNG PEOPLE'S HEALTH at the Montréal YWCA. In the late Spring of 2011, he will participate in the 2nd tour to promote the 10-Day Screen-Free Challenge in France.

Elisabeth Gleckler

Elisabeth’s first career was in advertising as a graphic designer and art director. She started in public health when she was in Peace Corps assigned in health education in Central America in the 1980s, returning to the US to study in New Orleans. Media literacy was introduced to Elisabeth when she was evaluated public health efforts in tobacco prevention in Louisiana in the 1990s. Since then, as a health promotion teacher, as a researcher, and mentor to students, she has integrated media education in her health communications work. Elisabeth conducted many formative and pretesting public health communications programs for the state and local non-profits. She taught undergraduate and graduate health promotion for domestic and international students. Based on the research that she collected she developed health promotion ad campaigns, websites and community health programs. She is interested in behavior change and the environmental influences on health and medical staff clinical choices. Since 2005, (post Hurricane Katrina) she has been working in evaluation, new technologies, online evaluations, usability testing and use of GIS, SPSS and other software.

Adam Kenner

Secretary/Vice-President for the ACME Mid-Atlantic region

Adam Kenner has been a technology and media educator, consultant and speaker for over 20 years. He has taught courses, seminars and workshops and addressed city, state and national conferences.

Adam has been teaching technology at Horace Mann School in New York since 1986. He served as chairman of the Computer Department from 1988 to 1997, when he became Horace Mann’s first Director of Technology. Adam is a founding member and former chairperson of the New York Consortium of Independent School Technologists (NYCIST) and a member of the New York State Association of Independent Schools (NYSAIS) Technology Committee.

Adam Kenner and Sheryl Rivera developed an acclaimed, comprehensive and highly adaptable Media Analysis curriculum for Middle and High School courses in 2004. They have helped raise other schools’ awareness of this exciting, engaging and critically important component of today’s curricula. Their insightful and entertaining media literacy presentations showcase the culture-creating effects of mass media and inspire participants to be educated and savvy media analysts and consumers.

Henry Kroll

Vice President for the ACME Rocky Mountain region

Henry Kroll has been involved in public service broadcasting both in television production and public policy advocacy for nearly 40 years.

He was a member of the acclaimed KQED TV "Newsroom" program in San Francisco which pioneered comprehensive, public interest coverage of from local news to global events following a citywide newspaper strike in 1968.

Kroll was the Executive Director of the Cultural Environment Movement, a pioneering group of policy reformers, media makers, attorneys and academic professionals lead by America's preeminent scholar of communications, George Gerbner, Dean Emeritus of the Annenberg School of Communication.

Kroll is representing ACME at the Rocky Mountain Center for Health Education in considering the public benefits of bringing media literacy values of the Catalyst Institute to interest educators and students within the Denver Metro Area later this year, 2009 and beyond.

Bob McCannon

ACME President

A founder and the Executive Director of the New Mexico Media Literacy Project for 12 years, I developed their ground-breaking media skills, analysis, and prevention curricula as well as building the organization to eight employees. I presented and did workshops in every NM school district, almost all of the 50 states and many countries. When I retired from NMMLP in 2005, I left it with eight employees and $800,000 in cash assets. Seeing the need for an action-oriented media education organization that was free of Big Media, I co-founded ACME in 2002 and am very active as Vice-President. I do workshops and keynotes on a selective basis.

Sheryl Rivera

Vice-President for the ACME New England region

Sheryl Rivera has been a technology and media educator, consultant and speaker for over 20 years. She has taught courses, seminars and workshops and addressed city, state and national conferences.

has been providing computer consulting and support services to businesses and schools since 1992 when she co-founded RiveraTechnics, Inc., a computer and network consulting firm. She has been working in the Technology Department and at Horace Mann since 2002. Sheryl is the President of the New York City chapter of the Action Coalition for Media Education, an independent clearinghouse and consortium for media educators and organizations.

Amanda Shaffer

Vice-President for the ACME Pacific region

Amanda Shaffer is Communications Director at the Urban & Environmental Policy Institute at Occidental College in Los Angeles, CA. She also teaches community groups how to use Web 2.0 to get their message out, and advocates for media reform on the steering committee of the SoCal chapter of Common Cause’s Media and Democracy project.

Sara Voorhees, Secretary

Treasurer/Vice-President for the ACME Southwest region

Sara Voorhees was a nationally syndicated film critic for 22 years until her retirement from television in 2002. She is on the board of directors of the Broadcast Film Critics' Association, She continues to write film reviews, and appears on television on an emergency basis. She is the author of "The Lumiere Affair" which will be published by Simon and Schuster in 2007.