As the longest-serving executive director of Area Cooperative Educational Services (ACES) and now, in retirement, a pivotal member of the ACES Education Foundation board, Peter C. Young has dedicated himself to helping ACES help children.

On March 22, Peter was honored at the 15th anniversary ACES Education Foundation Celebration. Peter joined the ACES Education Foundation Board when it was founded 15 years ago and is proud to serve with a dedicated group who bring a range of abilities, expertise, and experiences to support the ACES mission.

“I think the thing that I’m so supportive of with the foundation is the cooperative nature of the foundation board—these are the ways we can help. The money we raise gets plowed right back into ACES programs,” says Peter. “So I’m thrilled to be recognized, but I’m also thrilled that part of that recognition is raising money for programs ACES is currently running, some of which I’ve had a hand in getting started.”

Founded in 1969, ACES was kick-started with federal funding under Title III of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). When Peter signed on with ACES in 1970, he brought his background as an educator who had just completed working on the mission of Project DISCUSS, a Title III ESEA project providing social studies curriculum to seven school districts in the Middletown area.

Within six months of joining ACES, Peter was named executive director and remained in the role for 32 years, during which he built the agency up to provide a wide variety of services and programs with 26 public school districts in south central Connecticut.

From the start, the cooperative nature of ACES—working with school districts to provide needed services—clicked with Peter.

“It was really created by the superintendents. They were thinking ‘cooperative.’ They kept looking for ways that we could cooperate,” says Peter. “The [ACES] board that was set up included board of education members from each one of the school districts, so it became an outgrowth of those school districts—25, then 26 of them—but one that really tried to address their needs, rather than creating new programs and saying, ‘Wouldn’t you like to buy this?’”

When Peter retired in 2002, more than 90 percent of ACES agency revenue was derived from sale of services to its member school districts.

“It’s an entrepreneurial venture,” says Peter. “If you’re not providing services, the school districts are not going to sign those checks. So my concern was always that the organization continue to look at the needs of the local school districts, and with those needs, address programs that met them.”

Peter helped ACES weather periods of uncertainty such as the national financial crisis that hit in 2008.

“Even during those times, 2008, 2009, there were some cutbacks, but the concept was well-ingrained and it’s stayed in place,” says Peter. “And resources came back, or people started realizing that, in this time of cutback, they were spending too much money doing things themselves and—again—it was good to do it cooperatively.”

An Idea That’s Come Into its Own

Today, ACES offers a huge array of services and programs to serve special education and gifted and talented students. Offerings include adult and vocational programs, inter-district programs, open and magnet school parent choice programs, minority teacher recruitment initiatives, behavior services for autism spectrum individuals, occupational/physical therapy, professional development, and technology services.

With enrollment currently underway for open choice schools and area magnet schools (applications at www.acesopenchoicelottery.org), ACES has become a well-known entity while keeping to its mission of supporting school districts.

“We never wanted to be seen as something over our districts or taking the place of our districts; we were there to help them shine and to meet the needs that they had,” says Peter. “Over the past few years, it’s sort of come into its own, and that’s probably a good thing, because now, I think [districts] are comfortable enough, and ACES is comfortable enough, to talk about the strength of their programs, but still with the notion of serving school districts.”

It may be hard to believe in this day and age, but the concept of special education services was still very new when ACES was created. In the early 1970s, students with special education needs were still being labeled “educable mentally retarded,” which was “a kind of horrible terminology, but acceptable at the time,” Peter recalls.

“Sputnik had gone up when special education got started,” Peter notes, adding that, as ACES got its start, “I think there were so many things that were coming down the pike at that point. They were saying, ‘We need more workshops for teachers.’ And that was a great challenge, and yet all these school districts said, ‘How can we have the same quality workshops that some of the large districts can have?’ One way we could do it was on a regional basis. And it didn’t mean necessarily that we had to run the ball, but we did things like get them to open up their attendance, so that if you wanted to go to a workshop in another district, you were welcome. And that whole cooperative effort really struck home. School districts wanted to work together; they just didn’t have the resources. So that became big part of what ACES did.”

As ACES executive director in the early 1970s, Peter was one of four key people who helped write Connecticut’s Education of the Handicapped Act. The groundbreaking legislation became state law before 1975’s federal Education for All Handicapped Children Act was passed. One enviable area addressed by the Connecticut law allows organizations like ACES to purchase and renovate buildings the same way as a school district would.

“With that enabling legislation, we kind of shot for the moon, and at that time, we got it—and it was wonderful,” says Peter. “And people around the country—there’s about 45 states that have these organizations—they always look at these facilities particularly, and they just salivate. It’s kind of a unique thing.”

During his years with ACES, Peter oversaw acquisition and renovations of more than a dozen buildings that house ACES programs. ACES even named a building his honor, the Peter C. Young Building at ACES International Center for Education and Services in North Haven.

In addition to adding facilities, during his 32-year tenure, Peter helped ACES grow from a three-person staff to more than 1,000, and took ACES annual budget of $250,000 to one exceeding $76 million. After retirement from ACES, Peter became chief financial officer of the Association of Educational Service Agencies (AESA), a national organization he’d helped to get established more than 40 years ago (in 1976, ACES became a charter member of AESA). Peter retired from his national position with AESA in January 2017.

Peter and his wife, Judy, have been married for 47 years and raised their two children in Branford, where the couple continues to reside. Judy is the proprietor of her Branford business of 35 years, Yesterday’s Threads, a vintage clothing shop. Their daughter Elizabeth Dole and her husband, Matt Dole, are parents of two and teachers at Hamden High School, while daughter Kristin lives in Manhattan with her partner, Benjamin Lynn, and is the stage manager for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.

In addition to serving on the ACES Foundation board, Peter also currently serves as vice chairman of the board of PierceCare, a nursing and retirement community in Brooklyn, Connecticut. He was a member of the Board of Directors of the National Cooperative Bank in Washington, D.C. and served as president of the American Baptist Churches of Connecticut from 1996 to 2002.

In everything he does, Peter says, cooperation is key.

“That cooperative notion has certainly been a strong part of my life, and also in my church work,” says Peter. “I believe strongly that cooperative behavior among and between organizations allows them to do so much more, and to do this without weakening the individual cooperating entities. Participation with others does not put the individual entity at risk, but enhances their ability to carry out their mission.”