During Gayathri Ramkumar’s favorite lesson — a sort of mathematical guessing game — she’ll hear her students asking their partners things like, “Can you tell me the degree of the polynomial?”

Not only does the back-and-forth get the high-schoolers talking precisely about mathematical problems, but it helps English learners boost their language skills without forcing them to talk in front of the whole class.

Ramkumar is a math and computer science teacher at Aurora Central High School, one of Colorado’s most diverse schools, where about half of the students are learning English.

She is also one of named a semifinalist for the state’s 2026 Teacher of the Year award. The winner will be announced in October.

Ramkumar talked to Chalkbeat about why she switched careers, how she incorporates educational influences from India and America into her lessons, and what advice she gives to college-bound students.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Was there a moment when you decided to become a teacher?

My journey into teaching wasn’t one of those stories where I always knew I wanted to be an educator. In fact, 25 years ago, fresh out of high school, I never would have imagined myself in a classroom. It was only after stepping away from engineering work to raise my kids that I unexpectedly discovered a love for teaching. Teaching them reading and math before they started school wasn’t just a responsibility; it became something I genuinely enjoyed. That experience sparked a passion in me, one I hadn’t realized was there, and it ultimately led me down the path to becoming a licensed teacher.

How did your own experience in school influence your approach to teaching?

I completed both my high school and bachelor’s degree in India, where the teaching style was very traditional. From an early age, I was used to taking extensive notes and doing a large volume of homework. Teaching in the U.S. has given me the opportunity to reflect on and compare both educational systems. I strive to integrate the best aspects of each into my own teaching approach. For example, when planning a math lesson, I draw inspiration from problem-based U.S. curricula such as Illustrative Mathematics and Desmos, which I’ve come to truly appreciate and enjoy. At the same time, I firmly believe in the value of practice, and I incorporate worksheets that I’ve found effective from my own experience as a math student in India.

Tell us about a favorite lesson to teach.

As a concurrent enrollment math teacher at the high school level, I strive to maintain the academic rigor of college-level math while also making it accessible, engaging, and developmentally appropriate for high school students. I always try to create lessons where students are engaging in content through exploration, discovery, and collaboration long before formal definitions or procedures are introduced.

One such lesson, adapted from Illustrative Math, was called “Info Gap.” The format supports precise mathematical communication and problem-solving. The lesson’s purpose was for students to put together what they have learned about sketching graphs of polynomials in factored form and factoring polynomials using division. Students worked in pairs, each receiving one of two card types. One student had the problem card with the problem that needed to be solved but lacked certain key details, such as its degree, intercepts, or end behavior. The other student held the data card containing the missing data, but they were not allowed to simply hand over the answers. Instead, the student with the problem card had to ask thoughtful, specific questions and explain their reasoning for needing that information to solve the problem.

One of the most powerful outcomes was the lesson’s support for multilingual learners. In whole-class settings, these students often hesitate to participate due to limited confidence with academic English. However, they had the chance to use vocabulary like “zeros,” “multiplicity,” and “degree” in a low-pressure context. This dialogue supported both math learning and language development.

There was not a dull moment in the classroom. Students were engaged in meaningful dialogue, constructing knowledge collectively, and supporting each other’s understanding. It was a moment that reaffirmed my belief in student-centered learning.

You help guide first-generation students through the college application process. What is your most important piece of advice for them?

I always encourage my students to take full advantage of by applying to all in-state public universities, even if they’re planning to go out of state. Plans can change unexpectedly, and having solid backup options can reduce stress later on. I also advise them to answer every question on the college application thoroughly, including those marked optional.

Tell us about a memorable time — good or bad — when contact with a student’s family changed your perspective or approach.

One memorable moment that really shifted my perspective was when I received a message from my student’s mother after I was selected as a semifinalist for Teacher of the Year. She congratulated me warmly and said she was proud to see someone from the immigrant community being recognized. She also told me she would be sharing the news in parent group chats to celebrate the accomplishment.

That message meant a great deal to me. It reminded me that the work I do doesn’t go unnoticed. It helped me realize that beyond academics, I’m serving as a role model and a source of representation for families in our school community. It was a humbling moment that gave me a deeper sense of purpose and a renewed commitment to advocacy, especially for students and families who may not always feel seen or heard.

What’s something happening in the community that affects what goes on in your classroom?

One thing that deeply influences my classroom is the current political climate and the emotional toll it takes on our community, especially immigrant families and first-generation college students. Many of my students are navigating fear, financial instability, and uncertainty about their futures, all while trying to succeed academically. These pressures create setbacks in the classroom, but not because of a lack of ability or motivation.

As an educator, my role extends beyond academics. I advocate for my students by helping connect them with school counselors, former students, and college access programs. I collaborate with families to ensure they feel informed and supported. I also offer extra academic support through flexible office hours, tutoring sessions, and culturally responsive teaching strategies that validate students’ identities. My ultimate goal is to help students not just survive, but thrive, and to remind them that college and long-term success are within their reach, even when the path feels uncertain.

What was your biggest misconception that you initially brought to teaching?

When I first started my licensure process, I didn’t realize how much advocacy teachers do for their students, their colleagues, and the community in general. Teachers are constantly and relentlessly advocating for better and equitable school policies and systemic structure in addition to teaching the content that they are actually hired for.

What are you reading for enjoyment?

I enjoy reading historical fiction books, specifically by Ken Follett. Recently, I have been enjoying fantasy fiction.

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters.

OKLAHOMA CITY — Those who knew Melissa Evon the best “laughed really hard” at the thought of her teaching family and consumer sciences, formerly known as home economics.

By her own admission, the Elgin High School teacher is not the best cook. Her first attempt to sew ended with a broken sewing machine and her mother declaring, “You can buy your clothes from now on.”

Still, Evon’s work in family and consumer sciences won her the 2025 Oklahoma Teacher of the Year award on Friday. Yes, her students practice cooking and sewing, but they also learn how to open a bank account, file taxes, apply for scholarships, register to vote and change a tire — lessons she said “get kids ready to be adults.”

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for ����Ӱ�� Newsletter

“Even though most of my career was (teaching) history, government and geography, the opportunity to teach those real life skills has just been a phenomenal experience,” Evon told Oklahoma Voice.

After graduating from Mustang High School and Southwestern Oklahoma State University, Evon started her teaching career in 1992 at Elgin Public Schools just north of Lawton. She’s now entering her 27th year in education, a career that included stints in other states while her husband served in the Air Force and a break after her son was born.

No matter the state, the grade level or the subject, “I’m convinced I teach the world’s greatest kids,” she said.

Her family later returned to Oklahoma where Evon said she received a great education in public schools and was confident her son would, too.

Over the course of her career, before and after leaving the state, she won Elgin Teacher of the Year three times, district Superintendent Nathaniel Meraz said.

So, Meraz said he was “ecstatic” but not shocked that Evon won the award at the state level.

“There would be nobody better than her,” Meraz said. “They may be as good as her. They may be up there with her. But she is in that company of the top teachers.”

Like all winners of Oklahoma Teacher of the Year, Evon will spend a year out of the classroom to travel the state as an ambassador of the teaching profession. She said her focus will be encouraging teachers to stay in education at a time when Oklahoma struggles to keep experienced educators in the classroom.

Evon herself at times questioned whether to continue teaching, she said. In those moments, she drew upon mantras that are now the core of her Teacher of the Year platform: “See the light” by looking for the good in every day and “be the light for your kids.”

She also told herself to “get out of the boat,” another way of saying “take a leap of faith.”

Two years ago, she realized she needed a change if she were to stay in education. She wanted to return to the high-school level after years of teaching seventh-grade social studies.

The only opening at the high school, though, was family and consumer sciences. Accepting the job was a “get out of the boat and take a leap of faith moment,” she said.

“I think teachers have to be willing to do that when we get stuck,” Evon said. “Get out of the boat. Sometimes that’s changing your curriculum. Sometimes it might be more like what I did, changing what you teach. Maybe it’s changing grade levels, changing subjects, changing something you’ve always done, tweaking that idea.”

Since then, she’s taught classes focused on interpersonal communication, parenting, financial literacy and career opportunities. She said her students are preparing to become adults, lead families and grow into productive citizens.

And, sure, they learn cooking and sewing along the way.

“I’m getting to teach those things, and I know that what I do matters,” Evon said. “They come back and tell me that.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oklahoma Voice maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Janelle Stecklein for questions: info@oklahomavoice.com.

Growing up in Mifflin County, Pennsylvania, as one of seven kids of divorced parents, “I found school to be this place of stability, while some other parts of my life were in transition and in changes,” Crosson told ����Ӱ�� in a recent interview. 

“I was a pretty natural student most of the time,” she added, “but it was mostly because I had incredible teachers who invested in their students so far beyond what is expected of the job.”

She said she can remember all the way back to a kindergarten teacher who wrote her letters over the summer because she’d be her teacher again in first grade. “I think I looked at that and said, ‘This is an incredibly rewarding way to spend a life.’”

It became a 14-year career that rewarded Crosson back — and on the national stage. The AP English teacher and high school journalism advisor was named the 2025 April 29 by the . The award, which follows her earning the Pennsylvania Teacher of the Year title, allows Crosson to spend the next year traveling across the country as an ambassador to fellow educators.

She’ll step away from her hometown high school five years after she went back there to answer “this higher calling to return to the place that made me into a successful adult and into somebody who had found joy and happiness in their adult life.”

Crosson, a first-generation college graduate, was selected from a pool of 56 local winners who were narrowed down to three other finalists: American Samoa’s Mikaela Saelua, an English language teacher who is the first finalist from the seven islands in the program’s history; Washington, D.C.’s Jazzmyne Townsend, an elementary school special education teacher and children’s book author; and Colorado’s Janet Renee Damon, a high school history teacher at a transfer school who runs a school-based podcast program focused on mental health disparities.

“Ashlie is an authentic, self-reflective leader who uses her experiences to help elevate her students into successful careers and life after high school,” the National Teacher of the Year Selection Committee said in a “She is also a strong and passionate representative for educators, using her voice to help people understand the weight of the teaching profession and the gravity of what teachers do.” 

Crosson said she grounds the bulk of her classroom work in real-world connections and projects, which allow her students to explore English from a careers-based perspective, while also building understanding and empathy for people of diverse backgrounds across the world.

This is perhaps most apparent in her 10th-grade elective course called Survival Stories, which she began designing as a Fulbright Teachers for Global Classrooms fellow. In it, she wants her students to consider sweeping questions like, “What problems are we trying to solve and in what ways do we need to communicate across borders?” 

To keep the course accessible and age appropriate, all the material —from non-fiction texts and memoirs, to podcasts and films — come from the voices of teens and adolescents. This allows her students, Crosson said, to have, “really authentic and approachable conversations about things that can feel really big and really unapproachable.”

In today’s political climate, traversing some of these charged topics in rural Mifflin — an almost exclusively white town of just over , where almost of the vote went to President Donald Trump in 2024 — might seem daunting. Crosson’s approach is to begin with texts that take place as far from central Philadelphia as possible, so that by the time students reach stories from their own community — some of which they may have otherwise met with preconceived notions — they are able to analyze them with more nuance, greater empathy and a stronger text-based knowledge. 

“We are all here, going through our own human experience,” Crosson said. She wants her students to ask, “ ‘How do I relate to these people? How do I better understand these people?’ Because at the end of the day, my students also want to be better understood. So there’s a reciprocity there.”

When her students come to her with challenging political questions — for example about Trump’s recent executive orders looking to eradicate any focus on diversity, equity and inclusion in schools — she encourages them to return to the facts, asking, “What are the actual details?”

“I’m able to keep my opinions out of things because I’m also first asking my students to put their opinions on pause,” she said, “so that we have a chance to become more informed about things and have a better, more well-rounded understanding of what’s going on before we start trying to figure out our feelings about it.”

In addition to Survival Stories, Crosson teaches AP English Language and Composition and 10th-grade English, while also running the school’s journalism elective. At the newspaper and district magazine, called the Pawprint, she functions more as a boss and editor than teacher, she said, a position she cherishes, especially since a number of the high schoolers end up going into journalism.

“If students are basically getting simulations of future careers, I love that. And I love facilitating that.”

Crosson’s classroom is covered with colorful student artwork from floor to ceiling and ”where students place the word that will most motivate and inspire them throughout the year. 

In a video for , her students were asked to choose five words to describe Crosson: joyful, funny, caring, energetic (but not too much), passionate and dedicated were among their picks.

One student said she sees Crosson as “a safe space.” Another said that whenever she spots students struggling, “She’ll try to make you better as a student and [in] doing that you also learn lessons in how to take help and help others. So I think it makes students better people.”

Along with her teaching responsibilities, Crosson serves as the communications chair for her union’s negotiating team, assists with the school’s programming, leads the district’s international student trips and co-hosts “,” a podcast dedicated to teachers’ professional learning.

When asked her favorite book to teach, Crosson laughed and said, “I honestly think that every book becomes my favorite book.”

“There are some books that I’ve taught for 10 years,” she continued “and so now there’s so many different colored pens [on the pages]. The book is the timeline of my teaching career. And there’s something really beautiful about that.”

A 30-year educator in the Compton Unified School District, Inge is a and . 

He also taught Lamar’s 7th-grade English class at Vanguard Learning Center, where he shape Lamar’s academic foundation, introducing him to poetry, nurturing his ability to think critically and developing his passion for language. Now, Lamar’s an award-winning, internationally renowned hip hop artist.

Back in the classroom, Inge used to talk to Lamar about the importance of using his platform to drive change – an idea that would resonate throughout the rapper’s career. Lamar’s journey from Compton to earning and a reflects values that deeply resonate with Inge’s classroom philosophy: hard work, creativity and ability to balance education and talent. 

Now, joining the list of achievements is Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show performance, which Inge says is “a salute to Black history and an opportunity for millions of people to witness Lamar’s dynamic artistry.” It a bigger audience than the game itself, is officially the most-watched halftime show performance of all time and the first show with a solo rapper to , according to the Apple Music.

Inge spoke with ����Ӱ��’s Trinity Alicia about how Lamar’s academic foundation laid the groundwork for his storytelling success and how it continues to inspire his students in Compton.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

When it was announced that Kendrick Lamar would perform at the Super Bowl, what was your first emotion?   

I had a great feeling of joy to know someone who has honestly put in the work gets to be at the level he’s at and the stage he was going to be on. The city felt good. My students felt good. It was a circle of joy.   

Everyone was so happy for him because it was a chance for millions of people to see just how dynamic this person really is. It was a perfect example of how putting in hard work gets you great outcomes. It gave me a sense of pride to know he worked hard to be rewarded with this opportunity. He deserved to be there.  

How did you feel when you saw the halftime show?

My initial feeling was that it was a message he was trying to send to both America and to the hip hop culture in itself. There was a lot of thought put into each aspect of the show, and I’m proud of how it all came together because he did exactly what I know he’s supposed to be doing — teaching and sending messages to others. It was an awesome feeling for me as his former English teacher.   

What do you see as the major themes in his performance? Do you think there’s particular significance that those themes were performed at that particular Super Bowl in our current political climate?  

The major theme I saw in the Super Bowl performance was to wake up and understand what’s going on from an African-American perspective and a people of color perspective. The different stages, different colors, different movements, each song and each skit he did — even down to Samuel L. Jackson’s performance — it was so clear that everything was intentional.  

It was a teachable moment for those who wanted to look more deeply at what exactly Lamar was saying. And to me, it all made sense because I know he loves to debate — not so much a matter of right and wrong — but the meaning behind things and why it impacts people. So I feel he went into this wanting people to analyze and discuss the performance.  

Do you see parallels between your role as a Black male educator and what Lamar does with his art?   

Yes! I see one great parallel between what Lamar does and what I do — and it’s something I used to talk to him about — which is using your platform. I have a platform in the classroom and he has a platform on the stage. My platform is to give students wisdom, encouragement and understanding of what the future could look like for them. On stage, Lamar’s platform is to express what it feels like to live in an inner city, for those who have never been to an inner city, and to give people hope. A lot of his music deals with hope. It may not come in the way people expect, the music may have some colorful words every now and then, but at the end of the day, it’s about expression. I’m very happy he’s using his platform to share hope and not expressing negative aspects of hip hop that can sometimes come from the big stage.  

This Black History Month, are there any teachable moments that can be extracted from the halftime performance?  

The art of creativity. African-Americans were historically stripped of their creativity when brought over to this country, and here we are in the present where I feel the renaissance is coming back out and through hip hop — which is a creative outlet on its own — in music.  

When I saw all of the intentional choreography, I felt Lamar used the halftime show performance as a whole to salute Black history and I believe it was presented from the standpoint of how, from the beginning of our existence in this country, our poise and livelihood as Black-Americans flourishes when we are being creative.

Tell us about Lamar as a student. What unique qualities did he exhibit as a student, if any? Was there any indication early on that he had exceptional potential? 

One of the things I remember about him is that he was very quiet, which may be a little strange for others to hear considering this megastar can get on stage in front of hundreds of thousands of people to perform song after song. But when I taught him in the seventh grade, I felt he was academically sound for his age and just needed someone to push him in the right direction. 

I spent a lot of time instilling in Lamar that vocabulary is super important. When my students go out and speak in public, I want them to be prepared to use language comparable to their age group. So for his assignments, I would circle words on his paper he could improve on and give him a thesaurus to identify synonyms for those words to deepen his vocabulary. I told him I wanted him to have a little shock level because there is an understanding that people from Compton are not going to have the best profile. But I remember telling him I wanted him to be able to show people through his speech that he is sharp, strong, an academic … and not someone who is only successful on YouTube and on social media. 

How do you help students connect to their creativity and writing with activism and social justice? How do you think this shaped Lamar as the artist we know today?   

Connection with students is extremely important to me as an educator. I believe in this connection because it helps me understand how my students operate and I’m able to have a plan on how to individually impact each one of their lives both in and out of the classroom.  

It’s also very important for me to understand culture. I need to know what’s going on at home and their environments because I am aware I can’t teach everyone the same. When students believe in you just like you believe in them, you create a family dynamic in the classroom. I have always been a family-oriented teacher and once I have a student in my class, they are family forever. 

In that same dynamic with Lamar, he understands that people are going through things and wants to create music that makes people dance, but also invites listeners to think about their surroundings and to remind them there is a light out of the struggle if they work hard.

In your classroom, how do you encourage students to imagine, create and push boundaries in their own work? How do you believe Lamar’s schooling and upbringing in Compton translate into his character and art in the current political climate?  

One thing I do in my class when we are doing any type of creative writing, I tell students I will take the boundaries off of their assignments. That means if an essay or poem they’re writing causes them to say a word that isn’t deemed appropriate for school — as long as they don’t say it too many times — then it’s okay because I want them to say what they truly feel. Poetry is all about the five senses, and that in particular is not something I need to teach, but I just like to remind them of this so that when they are writing, they can reflect on their experiences and emotions. What I don’t want them to do is mute themselves so that what they’re writing isn’t what they feel.

I encouraged Lamar in the same way. At that time, many of my students were coming to school very angry and if something causes trauma, frustration or an inertia of energy building up, students have to be able to get it out. Expanding the boundaries in class was the thing that helped. 

Lamar’s music, especially in his later albums, has been known to be deeply shaped by themes of social change, inequality, activism and criticism of politicians. Do you think you saw the beginnings of this in his early writings in classroom assignments or discussions? 

I didn’t really see writings of social consciousness from Lamar. When you’re in the seventh grade, you’re typically going off of what the teacher is assigning. But I remember his passion for writing was unique and different from his classmates. Some of his writings were a little more thought-provoking. What happens is when you’re focused on writing and passionate about your writing, as you get older and start to see more outside of your city, surroundings and community, you will start to see gaps. When you start to see gaps, when you start to feel frustration. When you start to feel frustration, you start to express it. 

With Lamar, he expressed his feelings in class through his writing and does the same thing as an artist. Now, we are here today with someone who is expressing a full emotional closet, from his joy to his insecurities to his trauma throughout his music.

Compton Unified has recently been ranked first in reading performance, surpassing pre-pandemic levels in both math and reading, according to the Ed Recovery Scorecard. Given Lamar’s rise from Compton to global recognition, how do you think his journey can inspire students in fostering the art of storytelling? 

One thing I feel that our students of today can be inspired by Lamar’s journey is to understand the art of working hard and being passionate. Even though students are doing well, they need to continue to work hard.

Sometimes social media waters down the art of working hard to achieve goals. Since I know Lamar personally, I have the ability to give students a bird’s eye view of what it takes on a day-to-day basis to earn Grammys and to be the first hip hop artist to be given a Pulitzer Prize winner, which is no small feat. 

I give my students an understanding of how many hours it could take for Lamar and his team to make one song or the amount of songs he writes that fans will never get to hear on the radio. This is about a lifelong journey of trying to do your best in every aspect of your life. 

I use Lamar as a [symbol] of hope because he came from Compton. And while my students may not become a Kendrick Lamar, perform on stage or emerge into a world-renowned artist, I want them to understand what it takes to get to a level of success to be world-renowned in other industries and professions. 

What’s something that most of the world probably doesn’t know about Lamar?  

I’m most proud of the person Lamar is off stage. I love the man he’s become and the person he is striving to be.

When I taught him, he enjoyed being around his friends and sat next to his cousin in my class. Now, I can see the same regard for relationships in his life. He likes to be present with family. He doesn’t mind being vulnerable with himself and others he trusts in order to share about the insecurities he’s working on. It’s why I feel his music is very genuine … it’s debatable, you can talk about it and you can teach it. There are so many emotions that can be translated from his music. 

I don’t know how I would feel if I taught an artist and the nature of music was very negative and went against everything I believed as a person. But I thank God I get the privilege of being associated with someone who is out here, making an impact, making music that gives people hope and encourages them.  

They are journalism advisors, volleyball coaches, mentors, authors, learners, environmental conservationists, meditation guides, literacy coaches, and equity advocates.

Their communities range from a small island in America Samoa serving multilingual, Indigenous students; a rural town in Pennsylvania; an immigrant hub in Denver; to a proud but underserved Black neighborhood in Washington D.C. 

Though the communities they serve cover a broad spectrum, 2025’s Teacher of the Year finalists recognized by the Council of Chief State School Officers are united in their commitment to children. 

Chosen from a pool of 56 local winners,they have found ways to make kids excited about school in a particularly difficult period in public education’s history. 

The finalists, all English and history educators, have designed lessons and extracurriculars for students to reflect on some of the most pressing issues today: Gun violence, substance abuse, suicide, poverty, food insecurity, health and hygiene, and the environment. 

They acknowledge the world outside school walls, involve local organizations to expand students’ opportunities, and prioritize building relationships with kids and their families. 

“Students don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care,” said elementary teacher Jazzmyne Townsend, Washington D.C.’s finalist. 

Utilizing family interview projects, field trips to hydroponic farms and herbal gardens, all four find ways to bring students’ experiences, cultures and curiosities into the classroom.  

At a time when public education is under fiscal and political threat from the Trump administration, finalists share what has nourished their careers and how they keep joy in learning: 

Mikaela Saelua 

All of ’s high school students are learning English as a second language. Their mother tongue is Samoan – poetic, full of expressive vowel sounds and unique – leaving most words without a direct English translation. 

To break up the monotony of reading and writing, she launched a song translation project. In what culminates in music videos, students learn figurative idioms, metaphors and words to capture the soul of Samoan songs. 

“The goal isn’t just to teach them English; it’s to help them appreciate and express themselves in a way that feels true to who they are,” Saelua wrote in her finalist . 

Saelua encourages student expression outside the classroom as an advisor for a peer leader club, which with the help of a local nonprofit, performs skits at local elementary schools to discuss hard topics, from substance use to suicide. 

America Samoa for suicide for over 20 years. Saelua’s school in particular has lost two students in the last three years. Their teachers are learning to spot warning signs in things like journal entries. 

Saelua, a proud product of America Samoa’s public education system who returned after  a spell of homesickness in California, is the first finalist from the seven islands in the program’s history. 

“I’m carrying that with me and I don’t carry it lightly,” she said. “… it’s more than just me. It’s now me and all of American Samoa.” 

Ashlie Crosson

As wildfires raged in Los Angeles earlier this year, two former students ran into ’s Pennsylvania classroom, cell phones in hand. 

The sophomores shared headlines about the Trump administration’s – exclaiming how taking away resources during a catastrophe was exactly like what they’d read in Dry by Jarrod and Neal Shusterman. 

They were curious: How was the media covering this? What would happen next? 

Dry was the only fiction text from their course Survival Stories, a half-year elective designed by Crossen for students to build media literacy and talk about what they see happening in the real world. And though they’d read it months earlier, they were making connections and eager to chat.

In Survival Stories, they’d discussed humanitarian crises through the lens of young people surviving them – such as and stories about families navigating the Darién Gap. 

Survival is not new to their community, deeply impacted by the opioid epidemic. 

Crosson brings in texts that show them “what you’re experiencing here isn’t isolated. These are problems that exist all over the place. Your hometown is not the ‘problem.’” 

Now in her fourteenth year teaching, she stays attuned to body language, emotional reactions, attendance. A kid’s experience in her classroom clues her into their world.  

She has also found ways for young people growing up in poverty to challenge negative associations with their area and build hope for future careers by .   

“I teach English, but I can’t really get to that content if I don’t have a rapport and understanding of my students and what their needs are,” Crosson said. “… There’s no content mastery happening in American schools right now if we’re not evaluating and meeting the needs of students and families.” 

Jazzmyne Townsend 

Coming from a family of teachers, wanted to carve her own path in business. 

But today the Washington, D.C. Teacher of the Year is a self described “big kid” – eager to be on the floor, immersed in sand, Play-Doh, and paint, modeling active listening and motor skills.  

“I’m willing to hold your hand and walk you through it until you are in a place where I can release you to do that independently,” the special education teacher explained about her approach with her second and third graders. 

She’s the teacher that knows their families and weekend plans, who notices their haircuts and new shoes, who shows up to games that are important to them. 

Townsend launched a , a place for kids to gather twice a week to chat about their bodies, social media, healthy relationships and whatever was weighing on them. 

She makes a point, too, of sharing her experiences with kids so they can dream big. A children’s book author, she explained the process of drafting a manuscript, pairing with an illustrator and publishing. 

Her kids then became authors and illustrators themselves. Their book publishing project became a community showcase, with one student choosing the ability to manage the world’s trash, to keep the planet clean and healthy. 

“I’m showing you in my actions, how we interact and how we engage,” she said. “I’m showing you that I’m invested in you… Kids need people who are irrationally passionate about them.”

Janet Renee Damon

After 25 years in the classroom, high school history teacher finds herself working at a transfer high school, a culmination of “all of my skills, all of my heart and all of my joy.” 

She spends her days joking and encouraging introverted, empathetic “diamond souls,” kids who’ve faced undue pressure who are still shining through parental death or incarceration, the trauma of immigration, homelessness, gun and gang violence and teen pregnancy. 

Over half of Damon’s students are immigrants, from Rwanda to Honduras and Iraq. All have mourned someone killed by gun violence. 

She guides students in breathing and meditation exercises, a tool for emotional regulation. They create “life maps,” imagining how to prepare for life’s milestones, like renting an apartment. 

She explores, “how history has impacted your own community, your own family.” After a project where students explored how the body’s DNA is impacted by generational trauma, one student told her he never used substances again. 

She and her administrators are committed: When kids don’t show, a team goes looking, conducting home visits. 

Damon also helped students’ bridge past and present through an ongoing podcast program. Students researched the history of mental health disparities and called attention to their high needs for support amid clinical shortages, landing on Colorado Public Radio.

Only 5% of registered psychologists nationwide speak Spanish. After their podcast went on air, a Therapists of Color collective reached out to provide care free of charge. The student podcast project led another to discover her family were survivors of the federal government’s Indian Residential Schools. A different high schooler interviewed a relative about his history with incarceration. Both said the work was “healing” and helped them feel closer to their families and identity.

“We have to make school a place where kids want to be,” Renee Damon said, “not just have to be.”

But when she saw that her K-8 school district in rural Appalachia was quietly becoming a refuge for families from Mexico, Central America and Asia, she shifted gears and became an English as a second language teacher, pushing to smooth her students’ — and their families’ — transition to life in the U.S.

Her students’ English acquisition is key because many become their family’s translators, not just in school but elsewhere. “So their exposure to the language and their learning the language actually opens up doors and possibilities for their families,” she said in an interview.

Testerman on Wednesday was named the by the Council of Chief State School Officers.

As Teacher of the Year, she’ll spend a year traveling the U.S. as an ambassador to the teaching profession, telling The74 that she’ll urge other teachers to become advocates for their students — and for their fellow educators.

Testerman was selected from a field of three other finalists for the award: Alaska’s Catherine Walker, a high school science and career and technical education teacher; Georgia’s Christy Todd, a middle school music technology teacher; and New Jersey’s Joe Nappi, a high school history teacher who writes a blog on teaching about the Holocaust.   

All of the finalists, as well as the other state-level teachers of the year, on Wednesday learned from First Lady Jill Biden that when they visit the White House later this year, as is customary, they’ll also be the guests of honor at a , the first time that diplomatic nicety will be reserved for a group of educators, the Associated Press reported. Typically state dinners are used to woo foreign heads of state. 

Testerman, who earned a bachelor’s degree in elementary education and a Master of Arts in reading education from East Tennessee State University, teaches in , a K-8 school in a small farming town of about 4,500, located 250 miles east of Nashville. And she serves as the Rogersville district’s ESL specialist and ESL program director. She also coordinates the system’s summer programs and is a mentor teacher and member of the teacher leadership team.

She’s not the first ESL teacher to capture the top-teacher honor — in 2004, it went to Rhode Island’s , who designed the ESL program for the North Kingstown, R.I., school district. And in 2018, the recipient was , a Washington state ELA teacher who worked at a “newcomer school” for new immigrants. Other recipients have also worked with English language learners, even if the designation wasn’t in their formal title.

Here are five things to know about Testerman:

1. She has taught her entire career in a single school in rural east Tennessee.

The 53-year-old Testerman is a lifelong teacher, having put in 33 years in the classroom, all of it Rogersville. 

“It’s a beautiful place,” she said in an interview. “It looks like it’s a Hallmark postcard.”

She admits that her long career is “kind of unusual — teachers, as you know, tend to leave the field as soon as they’re able to do so. But I still find a lot of joy in teaching, and I feel like I’m as energized to keep teaching as I was years ago.”

2. Before working in ESL, she had a long career as a classroom teacher. 

Testerman spent most of her career, about 30 years, working as a first- and second-grade teacher before enrolling in Tennessee’s program and adding an English as a second language (ESL) endorsement to her resume. She has said she wanted to ensure that immigrant students and families in Rogersville had an advocate. 

“I try to make sure that my children and their families are assimilated here, that they’re participating in sports and everything, because if they assimilate, people will accept them more easily,” Testerman told when she was named a finalist.

3. While Rogersville is isolated and rural, her students are from all over the world.

Testerman has a full-time case load of 21 students, a mix of Spanish, Arabic and Chinese speakers, as well as a few who speak Gujarati, a language from the western Indian state of Gujarat. It accounts for a of Indian immigrants to the U.S. 

“It’s a pretty interesting breakup of situations and languages,” she said. 

Her students are divided between first-generation Americans born here to immigrant parents, and newcomers — many of whom have arrived in the U.S. “within the past year or so,” she said.

Testerman said her students occasionally face “some unpleasant situations” around discrimination in the mostly white community of Rogersville, “but that’s basically the rarity. My school has embraced them, has embraced their families. I think that I have the luxury of being in the role to kind of be the ambassador, to make that happen.”

She said most people in the area also embrace the newcomer families once they get to know them “because they see that they’re just like every other family. They love their students. They want them to do well and achieve so that they can create a good future for themselves.”

In her application for the award, Testerman wrote, “Simple gestures such as sitting with my students’ families at high school graduation or a school play goes a long way in helping them find acceptance in our rural area, since I have belonged to this community for decades and others trust my lead.”

Former student Nadeen Aglan told AP that Testerman goes out of her way to develop close ties with the families of her students. “Her kindness shows. Her compassion is really deep.”

4. She wants teachers to realize their own power — and fight for change.

Testerman said she is looking forward to advocating for teachers over the next year.

“There are 3.5 million dedicated teachers all over this country who invest time, energy and love into helping our students create the best possible future for themselves,” she said. “And I want to empower teachers by getting them to understand that they are their best advocates and their students’ best advocates. Teachers are the experts.”

Testerman said many times teachers must abide by policies that are “not made by people who spend a lot of time in classrooms. “It’s time for teachers to let their voices be heard.”

She wants teachers to advocate for students not just in their school building but, if needed, in their state legislature “when there is either an implemented policy or a suggested policy that you know is just not what’s best for kids.”  

5. She plans to return to the classroom after her year away.

National Teacher of the Year winners often leverage the honor to pursue big dreams outside of the classroom, including and . , the 2016 honoree, is now a member of Congress representing Connecticut. 

Testerman on Wednesday said her plan after her year away from the classroom is to return. “I still find so much joy in teaching,” she said. “I can’t honestly imagine my life without being a teacher.” That may change, she said, but at the moment she plans to return to the classroom.

Watching a child acquire another language is “an amazing, magical transformation,” Testerman . “There’s a level of excitement in a learner when they realize they are able to understand the language they are hearing around them.” 

But on Wednesday, the Swedish immigrant was named National Teacher of the Year — a recognition of the tight bonds she’s formed over 11 years with students and her efforts to bring teachers’ inspiring stories to the forefront.

“I hope that my story — it being so very difficult and wondering if this was the right thing — resonates with other teachers,” she said. “I just want my message to be lifting up the profession.”

Peterson, who teaches algebra, AP Calculus and other math courses at Union High School in Tulsa, was one of five state-level winners chosen as finalists by the Council of Chief State School Officers, which sponsors the program. As the national winner, Peterson will devote the next year to highlighting other teachers’ stories. That shouldn’t be a stretch for Petersen, who last year began , which she describes as an educator version of the popular website . Over the past year, she’s visited teachers in 40 of 77 Oklahoma counties and posted their stories on social media. 

“I want to create a space for teacher voices and elevate their joys and their struggles,” she said.

Her message is a counterpoint to what some Oklahoma teachers have heard from their state leaders in recent years. In 2021, Gov. Kevin Stitt signed limiting class discussions of race and gender.  And Superintendent Ryan Walters has pushed to have over violations.

But on Wednesday, Walters had nothing but praise for Peterson.

“She has inspired our children in the classroom and lifted up other teachers’ potential across our state,” he said in a statement. “Oklahoma is lucky to have her, and we are happy to share her talents with teachers and students across the country.”

Peterson declined to address whether her efforts to celebrate teachers grew out of recent controversies.

The daughter of medical missionaries, with a Swedish mother and Iranian father, Peterson lived in four countries before settling in the U.S. About six years ago, she began sharing her experience as a sometimes lonely immigrant as a springboard to connect with her students. Some of them write her letters sharing their stories, but most accept her invitation to meet one-on-one. 

Daniel Flores, a senior who had Peterson for AP Calculus in 11th grade, said that beginning-of-the-year meeting set a positive tone for the rest of his junior year. 

“As a passionate learner, there is nothing greater than connecting with an equally passionate educator,” he said.

After her rocky start  teaching high school math, Peterson became one of five administrators of the blog, where teachers post reflections from their day. The blog, she said, is the reason she stuck with teaching.

“I’ve trained my brain,” she said. “It’s a mindframe where I see good that happens in the classroom that others might not see.”

Memorable moments for her have included watching two students who usually don’t get along help each other in class, or a student who usually says he’s “not a math person” say something positive about what he’s learned.

post was about a gift she received from a student who she said “checked every single box of trauma.” When his mother died, he had to move in with his alcoholic father. But he graduated second in his class and is a talented viola player who worked at a local music store to pay for his instrument.

He told Peterson he wanted to show her his appreciation, but couldn’t afford to buy her anything. Instead, he offered to play her favorite song — — on his viola. The moving ballad includes the lyrics, “Because I knew you, I have been changed for good.”

That line, she said, is central to her teaching philosophy.

“I hope that the way I love my students is so deep and true,” she said, “that it changes the way that they love and view themselves.”

“I just love love,” said Kielma, who teaches at Bristol Eastern High School in Connecticut and is one five finalists for 2023 National Teacher of the Year.

By chance, her first time leading a ceremony was the marriage of a former student. The two stayed in touch on Facebook after Andrew Michaud graduated in 2014. He didn’t learn Kielma was a minister until he and his fiancée Jane began searching for a venue.

“I couldn’t have drawn a more perfect hand of cards,” Michaud said. “I didn’t feel nervous standing at the altar because I’m just kind of hanging out with my favorite teacher.”

All of this year’s finalists hold a similar place in the hearts of their students, parents and colleagues. While passionate about their subjects, and deeply skilled, they are perhaps best known for the relationships they’ve forged. 

“I thrive off connections in my classroom,” said Kielma, who teaches biology and sees a lot of the same students in her biotechnology and forensics elective. “The students won’t work for me if they can’t connect with me.”

This month, the Council of Chief State School Officers will name one of these five state teachers of the year the national winner. That educator will serve as an ambassador for the profession, speaking across the country and focusing on an issue that defines them as a teacher.

Kimberly Radostits of Illinois mentors ninth graders to help them get a strong start in high school. Jermar Rountree from the District of Columbia helped build an afterschool program where students can learn fencing and cooking. Rebecka Peterson of Oklahoma helps administer a blog where educators highlight the positive side of teaching, even when it’s hard to find. And Harlee Harvey has immersed herself in the culture of one of the most remote places on earth — the Alaskan tundra, accessible only by bush plane. 

Harvey teaches first grade at Tikiġaq School, which serves a native whaling community in Point Hope, a narrow peninsula that juts out into the Chukchi Sea. After growing up in Fairbanks, where she went to the University of Alaska, she felt drawn to teach in the rural Iñupiaq village.

Most educators there don’t last long.

The school is “constantly restarting,” Harvey said. “We’ve had a new principal just about every year.”

In the spring, children often hunt with their parents for bowhead and beluga whales. The resulting bounty forms the centerpiece of the village’s spring festival and can feed families for months. Harvey designs culturally relevant lessons on topics such as ice fishing and how Native Alaskans melt ice and snow to make water in winter.

“The big push is framing education through their worldview,” Harvey said. “If there’s a story about going to the market and buying watermelon — they don’t do that out here.”

Harvey consults with Molly Lane, the school’s librarian, on hunting seasons throughout the year, blending facts about bearded seals, caribou and other animals into her lessons. Her attention to enduring traditions reflects broader efforts in the North Slope Borough School District, which includes Tikiġaq School, to infuse the students’ culture into the curriculum. 

The year Harvey took charge of the yearbook, for example, she included students’ Iñupiaq names along with their English ones.

“That had never happened before,” said Lane, who has had three children taught by Harvey. “So many people appreciated her effort in getting the names spelled correctly.”

‘An outsider looking in’

Earning students’ trust, as Tulsa’s Peterson learned, is all about vulnerability. Born in Sweden to a Swedish mother and Iranian father, the Union Public Schools math teacher likes to share her experiences living in four countries before arriving in the U.S. 

“As a child moving that much,” she said, “I always felt like an outsider looking in.” About six years ago, she began sharing her story with students and inviting them to meet with her one-on-one to tell theirs. The experience, she said, has “transformed” her classroom and made students more willing to speak up about their needs.

Daniel Flores, a senior who took Peterson’s Advanced Placement Calculus class in 11th grade, said he initially felt unsure of himself after a rocky experience taking pre-calculus remotely during the pandemic.

“She assured me that we would work through it. We did. She answered every question I asked,” said Flores, who will attend Stanford University on a full scholarship this fall. “I have always had a strong support system in my family, but Mrs. Peterson stood out in the way she made her classroom a little home for every one of her students.”

The past three years have been some of the most challenging many teachers have ever experienced. But in the blog, Peterson always finds an encounter or observation worth celebrating. Entries include the time a student wrote her after her husband’s grandmother died and when she teared up watching members of the school’s perform in a musical.

“It shifted my mind as a teacher to be intentional about adding meaning to those small beautiful moments,” she said.

‘The most heartwarming thing’

Radostits, a Spanish teacher at Oregon High School, in a rural area east of Chicago, has the same outlook toward students in her Hawks Take Flight mentoring program, which she launched with colleagues in 2008. The program’s weekly afterschool sessions target students who struggled with absenteeism or missing assignments when they started ninth grade. 

They discuss what’s going well and where they get stuck. If the students meet their goals for the week, they earn incentives, like an extra $5 on their meal accounts.

“I love teaching Spanish, but honestly my content is just a vehicle to connect with students,” she said. “These kids become another part of my family.” When COVID closed schools in March 2020, the program took a pause, but the mentors still offered individual support. Those one-on-one Google Meets often turned into group homework sessions.

“It was the most heartwarming thing for me,” Radostits said. “I thought they were going to go rogue on us and they didn’t.”

Radostits knows that shows freshmen who are on track academically are more likely to graduate on time. Rather than relying on teacher recommendations to identify students who needed mentoring, she pushed for a more data-driven approach. She turned to Adam Larsen, assistant superintendent in the Oregon Community Unit School District, who helped to develop an to detect which students might need extra help. Sixteen schools outside the district have since adopted it.

“We ultimately wanted to be laser-specific about finding kids who were at-risk of dropout, not necessarily the ones who were causing the most visible problems in class,” Larsen said.

‘They miss me’

Radostits is on a sabbatical this year, but she’s still mentoring students. Being a statewide winner can leave teachers feeling torn. Even if they’re still teaching, they often take time off for speaking engagements and conferences. 

“They miss me, and I miss them,” Rountree, a physical education teacher, said about his students at Center City Public Charter School’s Brightwood Campus. He said it’s especially hard to keep his pre-K students in a routine when he’s out. 

Noticing that the pandemic left many students feeling isolated or quick to anger, he takes time in class to let them air frustrations and share what makes them happy. When they come to P.E., they grab a clothespin to indicate their feelings — red for angry, blue for sad, yellow for OK and green for happy. 

“Isaiah loves Coach Rountree,” Toya Newton said of her youngest son. “He comes home explaining the different activities.” 

The 10-year-old recently brought home some sticks the class used to bang out a rhythm on the floor. Rountree said Isaiah asked to practice drumming at home. Newton’s oldest son Eric had Rountree for flag football, and she especially appreciated the coach taking his class across the street to Walmart to explore healthy meal portions and learn to read nutrition labels. 

“My son was overweight,” she said. “Now he’s playing flag football in high school and his weight is perfect.”

Rountree seeks help from community organizations in D.C. to address other needs — partnering, for example, with , a nonprofit that provides meal tokens that families can use at participating food trucks or restaurants throughout the city. And he helped launch an afterschool program featuring nontraditional activities like boxing and learning Japanese. 

As if Rountree weren’t busy enough already, he also stepped in this spring to serve as stage manager for the school’s first musical since the pandemic — “Annie Jr.”

“I just want to make sure my kids get it all,” he said.

Long before he arrived in the U.S. at age 16 with just $20 in his pocket — and longer still before he rose to prominence as New York State’s 2019 Teacher of the Year — Alhassan Susso would watch and learn how his grandmother in Gambia helped others.

She had tremendous influence in the community because she knew everyone’s story, he said, and used those deep connections to work toward a greater good. 

“She could recount seven generations of their families,” Susso said. “As a result, people listened to everything she said. I realized, if I know someone’s story well, I’m able to speak to them and understand them.”

Susso’s roots in his South Bronx school community do not stretch back quite so far but the 37-year-old social studies teacher has had a deep impact that spans from his current to his former students, their families and the impoverished neighborhood that surrounds them.

“He knows that we need him,” said Berena Cabarcas, Susso’s principal at International Community High School. “He is committed to our population.”

Susso’s students have stories that closely resemble his own. Soon after landing in Poughkeepsie, New York and being placed in 11th grade, Susso’s living arrangement with an older brother evaporated. He found himself on his own, working at a local grocery store to pay rent, squeezing in school and scrambling to do more than just survive.

Susso’s students, all of them in this country for less than four years and 99 percent living below the poverty line, come from across the world, with a majority hailing from Latin America, French West Africa and the Middle East. Taken together, they speak dozens of languages — including Wolof, spoken in Senegal; Fula, common in West Africa; French and Spanish — but are united in their struggle for assimilation and the fight for a better life. 

“What they share is being new to this land and trying to figure out how to successfully navigate that,” Susso said. “My job is to help them weave through some of the complex challenges they might face and make sense of their new home.”

Adama Bah, a 17-year-old senior who hails from Guinea, takes inspiration from her teacher’s lived experience. Repeated hardships and a series of personal tragedies meant that Susso had to set aside his own ambitions in America to help his family back home, delaying him from graduating college and beginning his career until his late 20s. 

“If he did it, then I can too,” Bah said, adding that every step she takes toward success creates a model for her younger sister. 

Susso starts his immigrant students on the path to college and future accomplishment in his now-famous Morning Class, an 8 a.m. gathering whose exceptional results are part of the reason he was named Teacher of the Year. Meeting an hour before school begins, he imparts lessons on everything from time management to personal finance, from mastering mindsets and emotions to creating vision boards and crystallizing goals. Students also get intensive instruction on interpersonal communication skills and leadership.

“I was writing an essay for a college class and was really struggling,” said senior Anarosa Encarnacion. “He teaches us to improve our writing and communication every day. But you need to come with a specific question: He makes you think about your work. You can’t just ask for the intro or the hook. You have to be specific.”

In 2015, when the class was first offered, 29 students attended and all went on to college, Susso said. The following year, 42 attended the class and 40 went to college. The Morning Class has since been replicated by his fellow teachers and is now a required course. While other factors are also at work, International Community High School’s graduation rate went from just to the year before the pandemic. 

One part in a community process

Graduating and going onto college can change the trajectory of a student’s life — and their families. But there are also pressing needs in the larger community, including persistent poverty and the threat of crime, that require here-and-now solutions.

To that end, Susso has paired his classroom work with broader efforts across the community, partnering with outside organizations like , which works to empower low to “no-income” immigrant women; , which seeks to curb violence in the Bronx and beyond; and the which collaborates with designers, educators, advocates and students to explain complex policy issues. Susso’s students work — and learn — beside him in these campaigns that broaden their world view and uplift their neighbors. 

Susso helped Sauti Yeti develop a curriculum meant to promote healthy relationships and combat teen pregnancy and allowed the organization to collect data from his students who agreed to serve as a focus group. That information then helped to inform workshops for women and girls all over the Bronx.

Students volunteered for years to organize Peace December’s annual conference, setting up the meeting space, serving as ushers and absorbing critical messages meant to help combat the crime that sometimes prompts their fearful parents to keep them indoors. 

“In Africa, we get to be outside, be kids and play around,” said Amy Samb, a 17-year-old senior from Senegal. “Here, you can’t: There are always cars coming … and there is so much violence, (parents) would rather us be in the house. We don’t really get to be kids.”

The Center for Urban Pedagogy invited Susso’s class to examine several urgent issues, including immigration. For that project, he had his students fan out into the South Bronx to interview residents about the undocumented: Their efforts culminated in a pamphlet students distributed throughout the community explaining the rights of U.S. citizens and non-citizens. 

The Center later shifted its focus to food stamps and the minimum wage. Just as he did with immigration, Susso required students to ask community members, including local business owners, about the proposed hike to $15 an hour. Such exchanges are critical, Susso said: His students cannot properly work on behalf of others unless they understand their needs. Just as his grandmother did. 

“The people you are advocating for,” he said, “you want them to be part of the process instead of subjects of the conversation. It is always important to talk to community members to find out what they think about the issue we think they need help with. Instead of being the expert on this issue, you are learning about it and providing meaningful feedback.”

The comfort of keeping in touch

Some 100 former students showed up at the school on the day that Susso was announced . Among them was Fatou Boye, 24 and a preschool teacher at P.S. 96 in the Bronx. 

Boye graduated from high school in 2016 and credits her former teacher for helping her identify and work toward her goals, particularly through his Morning Class.

“It made me who I am today,” she said. “I’m very responsible because of the Morning Class. I learned time management, budgeting, finance, how to be successful in college, how to be accountable for my time.”

Susso and his students are bound together for life, which is why so many remain in contact long after graduation. Six years post-high school, Boye still considers Susso a trusted mentor.

“It is mandatory for me, at least once or twice a month, to call him, keep him updated about my life, what I’m thinking of doing,” she said. “He gives me advice … and when I’m stressed and need to release, I just call him. I keep in touch because of the comfort. With all of his experience, he has a lot to bring to his students.”

Boye still makes vision boards for herself and shares them with him when she’s done. And Susso has helped her in other ways, too, she said: As the only girl in her family, Boye was accustomed to soaking up everyone’s attention, a tendency that made her a less than ideal classmate. Susso noticed this and found a way to reset her thinking, she said. 

“He really helped me understand people,” Boye said. “When I was in high school, he printed out a book for me: We went through it for hours, talking about it. Slowly, he started molding me into a better person to interact with my classmates. To this day, when he reads a good book and he likes it, he’ll share it with me.”

Susso wants his students to collaborate with their peers and help others — the Morning Class also has a community service component where students have volunteered at area homeless shelters and raised money for cancer research. But he also desires for these young people to discover their own agency and capacity to be leaders.

“At some point in life, whether you’re a parent, a teacher, a boss at some organization, the president of a country,” he tells his students, “ you will be either a manager — managing every little thing people are doing, including your children — or you become a leader, in which you develop the skill of influence.”

In addition to offering life lessons inside the school, Susso has helped untangle misunderstandings at home. In one instance, a family was worried that their teenage daughter’s new job would jeopardize their food stamps. The girl, one of Susso’s students, enjoyed the responsibility and the money that came with it: She was heartsick when her mother pressured her to quit. 

“After school, I went to the house to speak to the mom, and … at the end of the conversation, she had a better understanding,” he said. “Her daughter was not making enough for the family to no longer qualify for aid.”

That same student is now a Ph.D. candidate at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, conducting research on bone marrow treatment. 

‘I know there are no accidents’

Two weeks before Susso’s high school graduation, he learned his grandmother, who had raised him and his siblings, had no place to live after her roof collapsed. 

Though he was slated to begin community college in the fall, he put that dream on hold to pick up a second full-time grocery store job: For six years, he worked 4 p.m. to midnight at one location and midnight to 8 a.m. at another.

The schedule was grueling but allowed him enough money to build a house for both his grandmother and his mother. Finally, with that mission complete, he enrolled in college in 2008 when he was 23 years old. But that summer brought new tragedy: His 19-year-old sister contracted Hepatitis B and needed to come to the United States for treatment. 

But the only way she’d be granted a visa was if the family could secure $25,000 toward her medical care. The situation seemed hopeless until one of Susso’s managers at Stop & Shop — he came from modest means but worked hard and saved money over the course of many years — offered to help. 

“To my surprise, he said, ‘I’ll bring you the money tomorrow because there should never be a price tag on a human life,’” Susso recalled.

Ultimately, his sister’s visa application was denied and she succumbed four months later. Eight hours after her passing, Susso’s grandmother died of a heart attack. 

The young man was devastated by both losses, but also motivated to help those who found themselves similarly stranded.

“Looking back now, I know there are no accidents,” he said. “This was my first year of college. I stopped all of my classes to be back home with my family. And then when I got back to the U.S., it became clear what I wanted to study: I wanted to become an immigration lawyer.”

Susso earned a bachelor’s degree in political science and history from the University of Vermont and took his law school entrance exam, but a trusted advisor steered him in another direction. By the time he would defend immigrant kids in the courtroom, they’d be headed to jail or targeted for deportation, the advisor said. Perhaps, she suggested, there was another way to empower these children.

Susso considered her advice and reflected on the wisdom of Nelson Madela, who once called education “the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” 

Suddenly, a new plan revealed itself: Susso would become a teacher.

“My mission was clear: When these kids graduate, they have avenues to have a better quality of life that they mightn’t have otherwise,” he said.

A worthwhile journey

Susso’s students have already been accepted to numerous area colleges this year, with many aspiring to transfer to bigger-name schools once they master English. It’s what they hope will help build their legacy, a frequent topic in Susso’s Morning Class.

Some of his students arrived in the United States on their own. Others flew across the globe with a single, similarly aged sibling, reuniting with a mother or father whom they hadn’t seen in years.

Anarosa Encarnacion, the senior who was grappling wih her college essay, has already felt the sting of xenophobia in her new home, most notably when a man told her and her family as they dined in a restaurant that they should speak English. “I just stayed quiet,” said the teen, who came to the U.S. from the Dominican Republic.

Susso uses these instances as teachable moments, giving his students tools to navigate such painful interactions.

“One of the things we discuss is that the way people treat you has more to do with them than you,” he said. “Other people’s reaction to you is really not your issue.” 

Principal Cabarcas said many of the students Susso worked with would have dropped out or taken far longer to graduate without his intervention, including the chance to attend his Morning Class.

“It was relevant and meaningful,” Cabarcas said. “Students could put that knowledge to use right away. They really saw how it would affect them — both in the moment and in the future.”

She’s thrilled that the widely recognized social studies teacher has chosen to remain on staff, to make the two-hour commute each way to teach at her school and return to the community that needs him.

Susso has had many other job offers and could easily teach closer to home: The father of three still lives in Poughkeepsie because it’s near his wife’s workplace. But no school or neighborhood would have as high a population of newcomer students as his, he said. 

“Why do I commute four hours a day to teach them?” he asked. “It is a journey that is well worth it.”

Disclosure: The Walton Family Foundation provides financial support to both the Weave Project and ����Ӱ��.

Lead Image: Alhassan Susso stands with a group of his students in front of a mural outside International Community High School in the South Bronx. Left to Right: Alhassan Susso, Adama Bah, Habi Kane, Amy Samb and Anarosa Encarnacion. (Jo Napolitano)

On March 13, 2020, Kyair Butts and his sixth-graders were deep into a particularly engaging forensic anthropology lesson, trying to answer this question: Why did Virginia’s Jamestown settlement collapse?

At the time, Butts — universally known as “Mr. K” to his students and colleagues and simply “K” to his friends — was a language arts teacher at Waverly Elementary/Middle School in Northeast Baltimore. When COVID-19 hit, he and his students were mere weeks from the end of the school year.

That evening, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan ordered schools statewide to close immediately. The city system, along with Maryland’s other 23 school districts, would , with a plan to reopen in early April.

Butts was worried. “If I waited two weeks, I’m just convinced that I would have lost some students — and lost some families,” he said. “And we just don’t have time for that.”

So he contacted all of his families and told them he’d be on Zoom first thing Monday morning, no matter what — greeting students, hearing about their weekends, commiserating, sharing fears, and teaching a lesson. 

While virtually every other school in the city took a break, his students logged on, attended abbreviated classes and quickly learned about Zoom waiting and breakout rooms.

That sent a message.  

“Families just really appreciated that,” he said. “So, in turn, they showed up. That’s all I can ask.” To be exact, 25 of his 60 students showed up. As the week progressed, that number grew, to 35, then 40, then 45.

Two years later he’s teaching at his third Baltimore school, Henderson-Hopkins, a that partners with Johns Hopkins University, located just blocks away. With the pandemic entering its third year, this Iowa transplant has become not just a go-to expert for advice about how to reach students remotely. He has established himself as a constant, supportive presence in his students’ lives, both inside and outside school, and an unlikely role model for young people growing up in a very different time and place than he did.

Honored in 2019 as Baltimore’s — district CEO Sonja Sontelises cited his “passionate commitment to student achievement and equity” — Mr. K. sees teaching as more than just a job.

One weekend a month, he brings students to get free books at the Maryland Book Bank. Then he takes them out to brunch and, on occasion, to attractions like Baltimore’s National Aquarium. The outings further cement his bond with families, said Henderson-Hopkins Assistant Principal J.D. Merrill. “That relationship piece is something that you can’t really quantify, but it translates into academic gains because the kids will work for him. They know he’s there for them, that he loves them.”

The ‘super magical’ promise of Zoom

When school shutdowns forced him to begin teaching almost entirely from his bedroom, he was sharing a Baltimore townhouse with two other teachers. One was a special education teacher at a local high school who taught from the adjoining bedroom, and another was a tutor for the startup Amplify, who conducted 20-minute lessons from the dining room. 

Butts learned that in other Baltimore schools, teachers at the same grade level were logging onto a single Zoom link and taking turns working as lead teachers. He and his colleagues tried it, adding a dedicated special education teacher to the mix and teaching one lesson apiece each day, as opposed to the typical model, in which each teacher delivers the same lesson to several classes throughout the day. 

While one teacher taught, the others provided support, answering students’ questions via Zoom chat, monitoring student work, and moving students into breakout rooms for individualized or small-group instruction. That kept students focused on the lessons and, in the bargain, standardized teachers’ expectations across the team, helping students figure out how to succeed day by day.

“My colleagues were also able to see me teach for an hour every day — and I was able to see my colleagues teach for an hour every day. We’d give each other really good feedback and great debrief sessions,” he said. “We kind of tweaked our practice so that there was a unity among what students were hearing, by way of expectations — it was actually super, super magical.” 

It also simplified the school day for families, who only needed to log on to one Zoom address each day instead of four or more. In all, students received about three-and-a-half to four hours of instruction each day. 

While attendance was rarely perfect, he said, 55 to 58 of 70 students would show up most days — a respectable 79 to 83 percent attendance rate, during a school year in which Maryland school systems collectively lost an estimated , according to one analysis. 

Two years later, Butts has retained his sense of urgency. “Zoom and remote learning has so much potential,” he said. “The problem, though, is that potential is still at rest until something gives a push to become kinetic and something kind of magical and brilliant.”

Love & straight talk

The magic that Butts offers is a dose of honesty about life and the world that is often missing in the daily press to teach content to students. The honesty lets him and his students talk about things that matter and be vulnerable with each other. 

Each year, he shares with his students a 2015 , based on the ground-breaking research of Harvard economists Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren, detailing the risks of growing up poor in Baltimore. The researchers found, for instance, that every year a poor boy spends growing up in Baltimore means a 1.5 percent drop in his earnings as an adult; if a young man spends his entire childhood in the city, by 26 he’d earn about 28 percent less than if he’d grown up nearly anywhere else. 

Butts translates data about Black Baltimore students’ achievement into a picture of what awaits them as young adults. If they’re not reading on grade level, for instance, their risks of not graduating high school rise, as do their chances of being incarcerated. Assistant Principal Merrill said, “He just makes these connections between what’s happening, but then he doesn’t make the kids feel bad about it. He has a plan: ‘This is what we’re going to do to get you caught up.’”

Because of recent interruptions in their schooling, that straight talk has never been more important, Butts said. “I’ve been very clear with students this year: ‘I’m going to be very transparent with you. I want to be open with you, I want to be vulnerable with you. But because I love you, I’m also going to tell you things that you need to hear versus things that you want to hear.’”  

Butts’ life story offers up a different kind of narrative of growing up Black. 

By his own admission, Butts led a “pretty middle-class” life: a child of divorce raised on the south side of Des Moines, he was liked by teachers, with a loyal group of mostly white friends. He liked school and thrived, especially in high school, where debate and mock trials fired his imagination. 

Being Black in “majority white spaces” gave him an awareness of a kind of implicit spotlight that shone on him. He fit in at school and knew that his friends and their parents respected him.

Actually, his classmates went a step further, electing him “Man of the Year” in his junior year. That shocked him. Butts knew he was well-liked, but never thought of himself as popular. “I could kind of blend in with various different friend groups or different kids, but I just didn’t think I was in the ‘In’ or the ‘It’ crowd.” To win Man of the Year proved to him “that I belonged.”

Decades later, that quiet confidence shines through — as does a decidedly Midwestern sensibility and set of tastes that he can trace to his youth: He likes Marvel superhero movies, progressive rock, and Ultimate Frisbee. In that way, colleague Christina Bradford said, his students get to see “a different representation of Blackness.” 

Butts, who sports thick black eyeglasses, laughed when asked during a midmorning recess period about his tastes in movies, music, and sports. “A little never hurt anybody,” he joked. “So we’re going to listen to it. I just choose me, and I hope that some kids are like, ‘You know what? I think I can choose me too.’”

‘He believes that Black students deserve the best’

Butts actually showed up at Henderson-Hopkins nearly three years ago to lead a teacher training, recalled Merrill. But as he and Principal Peter Kannam looked on, they were instantly impressed with his ability to both deliver the material and connect with teachers. Merrill pulled out his phone and texted his boss: Are you thinking what I’m thinking? 

Merrill ran back to his office, typed up an offer letter, dug in a closet for a Henderson-Hopkins backpack, hat, and folder, and ran back to the training room. Kannam signed the letter and they handed the odd parcel to Butts, even though they had no open positions. 

Eventually Bradford, the math teacher, accepted a job there — with the requirement that she and Butts could teach as partners. They both began teaching there last fall.

“You can tell that he treats each student as if they were his own kids,” she said. “And he is very clear about his expectations for them and truly believes and acts in a way that he believes that Black students deserve the best and are the best, which is really refreshing to experience and work alongside.”

Principal Kannam said walking the line between friend and teacher is harder than it looks. “Everyone says, ‘Relationship build,’ but it’s not to be students’ friends,” he said. “You’ve got to get them to work for you.”

Camyra Williams, 18, vividly remembers Butts’ class at Calverton Elementary-Middle School, where he taught her for fourth and fifth grades. Even now, she said, they talk regularly about school, and about life.

Williams remembers that he helped her come out of her shell, especially during preparations for debates, which taught her to both embrace the ideas she cared about and think about them logically.

“I put up a pretty good fight now, I’m not going to lie,” she said with a laugh. “Anything that I feel strongly in, nobody can beat me.”

At the end of her fifth-grade year, she was so grateful that she arranged a party in his honor, which she dubbed “Appreciation Day for Mr. K.”

She still relies on an exhortation he used to share with students: “Mind over matter.”

“It didn’t click with me at the time,” she said. But as she got older, it began making more sense: Everybody has hardships and bad days, she recalled him saying. You’ve got to accept that and keep going in life, no matter the obstacles. “It’s being able to control it, not letting it control you.” 

A senior who’s due to graduate next month from Baltimore’s Western High School, Williams still keeps a hand-written letter Butts wrote to her (and every other student) for fifth-grade graduation. It sits in a mirror frame, next to her graduation photo. In the letter, he tells her, “In you, I see someone who will change the world.”

“He didn’t have to do what he did, kind of like the typical teacher, the typical person,” Williams said. “But he wasn’t. And I will forever cherish him for that.”

‘This generation is in no way lost’

On a recent morning, a cool jazz ballad played softly on the classroom stereo as Butts led 24 sixth-graders through a reading lesson. He urged them to sound out large, unfamiliar words such as “humanitarian” syllable by syllable, in their heads, much as they once sounded out simpler words like “cat” when they were younger.

He clapped out “hu-man-i-tar-i-an” saying, “I know it sounds silly, it sounds a little elementary. But your brain is going to thank you.”

With a passage from a reading about the Black photographer Gordon Parks on a projector screen, he led students through an “echo read” of the passage, reciting short phrases that they repeated, en masse, like a congregation following the lead of a minister.

The technique is a standard one, but he brought it into the classroom, he later said, because he’s thinking more and more, post-pandemic, about the importance of reading fluency. “I haven’t spent this much time ever truly focusing on fluency,” he said. “There’s a precision to this.”

Being able to read is one thing, he said, but being able to demonstrate it is another. “Working on fluency has to stay going forward,” he said.

As schools look past the pandemic in 2022 and beyond, Butts said he’s hoping the public will rethink its idea of how students like his have fared. The dominant narrative is that remote learning was a disaster and that millions suffered possibly irretrievable “learning loss.” One July 2021 study from the consulting firm found that students, on average, were four months behind in reading and five months behind in math by the end of the last school year. 

In Baltimore, the most recent show that just 19 percent of city middle-schoolers read proficiently, compared to 37 percent in nearby Baltimore County and 53 percent in suburban Howard County. 

Butts said he saw a different reality with his students.

“They really attacked school,” he said. “Yeah, there were some students for sure who are in sixth grade that need some decoding practice, but I’ve also seen that before there was ever a pandemic. And the students that I had the virtual year, they were engaged — they asked questions. They found ways to just get it done.” 

He also roundly dismisses any talk that his students risk becoming a “,” as several critics have warned.

“If anything, I would like to think that it’s a ‘generation of opportunity,’” he said. “The coolest part about being a teacher, I like to think, is that every day you get to do something that allows others to present their best selves to you. And if that to me is a measure of success, aside from academics, this generation is in no way lost.”

Disclosure: The Walton Family Foundation provides financial support to both the Weave Project and ����Ӱ��.

A graduate of the Cleveland-area school where he’s taught for 25 years, Russell still works to pull together an annual basketball tournament and festival in Oberlin — the experience that convinced him it was a “joy” to work with high school students. 

“He just commands the best out of you when you’re tired and you feel like you can’t do anymore,” said senior Caleb Peterson, who has had “Russ” as a teacher every year since ninth grade and is taking three of his courses this year. He also played basketball freshman and sophomore year. “The lessons he’s taught me on the court or in the classroom will stick in my heart.”

On Tuesday, the Council of Chief State School Officers named Russell the 2022 National Teacher of the Year. Students and staff, wearing the school’s red, white and blue colors, gathered early at the school for a watch party. When the announcement came, just after 8 a.m Eastern on , “the whole auditorium lit up,” Peterson said.

Teaching American history with a focus on the Black experience — at a time of intense national scrutiny over how educators discuss race and discrimination — the veteran educator plans to focus his year as the nation’s top teacher on breaking down barriers in education.

 “I would like to focus on diversity and making sure students receive a well-rounded educational experience,” said Russell, adding that he’ll advocate for girls to pursue STEM fields and more men teaching in the early grades.

He was inspired to go into education when he had a Black male teacher, Larry Thomas, for eighth grade math. “Culturally I could relate to him,” Russell said. “ His family migrated from the South. My family migrated from the South. Some of the discussion I had in class was personal to me.”

Russell turned that connection to his cultural roots into a career, teaching U.S. History and electives on race, oppression and Black music that are among the school’s most popular courses. When he’s teaching, his booming voice carries down the hallways. 

“He puts his entire heart into his students and they are very engaged in his lesson,” said Denita Tolbert-Brown, a business teacher at the school who has worked with Russell for 24 years. 

Peterson, who is weighing offers from Temple University in Philadelphia and Clark Atlanta University, said even though reading doesn’t “grasp” him like it used to, Russell has sparked his interest in books about racial history.

“No matter what I end up doing, I want to have the same impact,” he said about his favorite teacher and former coach. “I want to try to be like him and excel and inspire people.”

Russell feels fortunate that he’s been able to work in a “progressive” district where he hasn’t faced backlash from the community over teaching about racial and gender discrimination. Parents, he said, have been “accepting.” That’s in contrast to Republican lawmakers in his state, who have introduced three bills to restrict lessons on so-called “divisive” topics. would also limit references to gender identity and sexual orientation.

Even so, broader opposition, combined with the impact of the pandemic, has left many colleagues feeling worn down.

“For me, it’s just the idea of respect,” he said. “If someone visits a doctor and the doctor prescribes the medication, we don’t think twice about that. In education, teachers are not trusted. Politicians are telling teachers what we can or can’t teach.”

CCSSO’s choice of Russell as the winner “does bring a perspective that could add to the conversation both in Ohio and across the country,” said Anton Schulzki, president of the National Council for the Social Studies. “But that will be up to him to decide how to use his voice.”

Bills like those proposed in Ohio are “scaring” people out of the profession, said Jeff Wensing, vice president of the Ohio Education Association.

“We are looking at a time where students are really not considering the education profession,” he said, adding that Russell’s most important contribution over the next year could be to spark interest in the education field among young Black men. “We need more teachers of color. Students need to see people like themselves standing in front of them as educators.” 

About 40 students at Oberlin Senior High School won’t be taking courses on Black history, race and gender oppression this fall — not because they’ve been canceled due to conservative opposition, but because Kurt Russell won’t be teaching them.

Jennifer Bracken, a counselor at the Cleveland-area school, said students would rather take those courses when Russell returns from his one-year sabbatical as Ohio’s Teacher of the Year. “They do not want to miss out on an opportunity to be in his class,” said Bracken. Russell is known for his energetic teaching style, and students told her that during remote learning, his class was the one “where being online was not bad.” 

A “divisive concepts” currently advancing in Ohio’s state House could raise questions about Russell’s popular courses, but he said that just makes him want to teach with more “tenacity.”

“Students are really wanting to talk about these subjects. They want that tough conversation,” said Russell, one of four candidates to be 2022’s National Teacher of the Year. “It’s the adults who have a problem with it.”

Whether the topic is discrimination or the mental well-being of the nation’s students and teachers, this year’s finalists aren’t avoiding touchy subjects. Both Russell and Joseph Welch, the nominee from Pennsylvania, teach history. They tread daily in their classrooms through lessons being debated in statehouses and school board chambers across the country. Whitney Aragaki, the finalist from Hawaii, warns stressed-out students competing for spots in elite colleges that they’re putting their mental health at risk when they don’t take time to rest. And Autumn Rivera of Colorado said it’s time to drop the “toxic positivity” behind the notion that teachers are selfless and only in the profession “for the kids.”

The Council of Chief State School Officers will soon name one of the four this year’s national winner.

“I’m not a superhero,” said Rivera, a sixth grade science teacher at Glenwood Springs Middle School in a resort town west of Denver. “I’m a human being who has needs and has to take care of myself.”

While her district hasn’t experienced mid-year teachers resignations like some, she said many of her colleagues have “reevaluated” at least once this year whether they want to keep teaching. It will take more than Starbucks gift cards and fulfilling Amazon wish lists to retain teachers, she said, adding that significant salary increases, college loan forgiveness, and covering moving and housing expenses are more likely to reduce turnover.

As a teacher leader, Rivera advocates for educators’ perspectives in policy, but it’s the way she balances high academic expectations and tight relationships with students that earned her the state’s top honor, said Principal Joel Hathaway.

Her work with students to support a local land trust’s efforts to and preserve the area as a state park is one example, he said. 

“It’s the difference between having a science fair and having a science project that actually affects the quality of life in your community,” he said.

Like many middle school teachers this year, Rivera notices a “gap in maturity” among students due to limited opportunities to socialize in person during the pandemic. But a recent project in which students used digital tools to create presentations about elements on the periodic table reminded her what they’ve gained. 

“This generation is going to be so resilient,” she said. “They could all have graduate degrees in tech after these two years.”

Aragaki, of Waiakea High School in Hilo, teaches both biology and AP environmental science. Her AP class is often just one of several college-level courses her students are taking. She sees them sometimes setting unrealistic — and unhealthy — expectations for themselves.

“I’m an alum of my own school. I tell them, ‘I sat in those desks where you are. I know what it’s like.’” she said. “We should push ourselves, but learning doesn’t always come through high-stress situations. We can learn in joyful and calm situations.”

She brings that sense of calm to the classroom through yoga, which she learned to teach last school year — “because I don’t have enough things to do,” she joked. Aragaki is also working on a Ph.D. in curriculum and instruction and mentors teachers who are new to the school.

During the summer of 2020, she helped lead an enrichment class to prepare students for remote learning in the fall. This year, to ease them back into in-person communication, she required them to give 10-minute lessons to their classmates on a topic they knew well. 

One taught Mandarin writing. Another demonstrated the proper way to throw a football. And a few Korean students showed classmates how to make the featured in the life-or-death Netflix series “Squid Game” — “but without the trauma response,” Aragaki joked.

Those presentations were a bridge to the next assignment — explaining an environmental science concept as if they were talking to an audience with no knowledge of the topic.

“If we can’t communicate science, we’re not helping society,” she said.

Sarah Polloi, the English department chair at Waiakea, said Aragaki has a talent for anticipating the needs and concerns not only of her students, but co-workers. When the school began to get a lot of new teachers, Aragaki and Polloi developed the New Warrior program, featuring sessions on issues unique to Waiakea and its challenges. 

“She’s always the brain and I’m the muscle. She ropes me into these things,” Polloi said, adding that even veteran teachers participate in the weekly meetings. “It’s just a safe place to ask questions.”

Polloi has a parent’s perspective as well. Her daughter Maya, now an 11th grader, had Aragaki’s biology class last year. Aragaki held individual conferences with students throughout the year, helping Maya get through the year of remote learning. 

“They would talk about curriculum, but also how my daughter was doing in general,” Polloi said. “She appreciated that one-on-one time.”

The finalists have left lasting impressions on their colleagues.

“I sort of thought I was with it. Then Joe came along,” said Larry Dorenkamp, who teaches U.S. history at North Hills Middle School with Welch. “Joe opened my eyes to the use of technology.”

During remote learning in the fall of 2020, the two traveled to historical landmarks and broadcast Zoom classes with a hotspot — a middle school twist on the way Pittsburgh’s own Fred Rogers introduced young children to his neighborhood.

Welch and Dorenkamp gave clues to their location and based on earlier lessons, students guessed where they were. One spot was where George Washington looked down over the forks of the Ohio River in 1753. Another was Fort Necessity, the site of an early battle in the French and Indian War. 

For Veterans Day, the pair — who have become best friends outside of school — drove to Washington and featured war memorials on the National Mall. Even parents tuned into the lessons.

Welch was elected last year to the South Fayette Township School District, also near Pittsburgh, and said he hopes to bring teachers’ perspectives to policy decisions.

Welch, like Rivera, understands why this school year is pushing some educators to question their commitment to the profession. He counted 90 out of 135 school days this year that he’s given up a planning period or lunch break to cover another teacher’s class.

“Every teacher likes to be creative. You might take a walk and get new ideas,” he said. “That time does not exist.”

Many educators, he added, feel defensive about their work. He recently taught a lesson about Thomas Jefferson, and a student asked about Sally Hemings, a slave who had children with Jefferson. The next morning, he received an email from a parent, with the subject line: “Yesterday’s lesson.”

“I thought, ‘Here we go,’ ” Welch said, bracing himself for criticism. Instead the parent thanked him and said his lesson became a topic at the family dinner table.

Avoiding controversial material, Welch said, only leaves students unprepared to handle difficult issues in the future.

“Let’s learn from the past, but you don’t have to be defined by it,” he said. “We can love America without loving every aspect of its past.” 

Children with special needs are among those whose learning has suffered the most because of the pandemic. But that’s not what Juliana Urtubey sees when she looks at her students at Booker Elementary in Las Vegas.

“Our brains work in slightly different ways. Our job is to find all of our students’ strengths,” she said about special education teachers. That perspective, she said, has given her an advantage over the past year. “I was mining for students’ strengths.”

On Thursday, the Council of Chief State School Officers named Urtubey the 2021 National Teacher of the Year. Surprised with flowers from First lady Jill Biden, Urtubey is the third special educator to receive the honor. Advocates said having a special education teacher as spokeswoman for the field over the next year could help as they push for an increase in federal funding for children with disabilities. But Urtubey said her focus will be much broader. Her message is that all students deserve a “joyous and just” education in schools where they feel a “deep sense of belonging.”

That starts, she said, by incorporating children’s culture into classroom lessons and their experiences at school.

“To me, as a Latina, our public institutions can’t separate our students from their families,” said Urtubey, who moved with her parents to the U.S. from Colombia and was trained as a bilingual teacher in Arizona when the state passed a law requiring English-only instruction. “I think about the tremendous loss of language and culture in this country.”

At Crestwood Elementary, where she worked before Booker, she helped that became an outdoor classroom for the school and another way to make immigrant families feel welcome.

Ciara Byrne, founder and CEO of Green Our Planet — which works with schools to teach science, technology, engineering and math through school gardening — remembers how plain and uninviting Crestwood looked in 2014 when she first talked with Urtubey about being part of the program.

“She was just full of beans and talking about how she was going to transform it,” Byrne said. “Within three years, there were murals all over the place.”

Many were painted by mothers of the “gnomies,” a student garden club that meets on Friday mornings. In fact, when Byrne wants to show the nonprofit’s work off to potential sponsors, she takes them to Crestwood, which not only has several planter beds, but also butterfly, bee and pollinator gardens.

Jose Silva was assistant principal at Crestwood at the time. He took notice of Urtubey’s “caring approach” and her expertise in working with special needs students. Now he’s principal at Booker, where he said her dedication to the school extends to her colleagues.

With the title of learning strategist, Urtubey coaches other classroom teachers on providing instruction for students with special needs and has served as a mentor to new teachers. But even veteran educators said they benefit from working with her.

Rosie Perez, another special educator at Booker, called Urtubey when she was working on a certification from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. They had never met before, but Perez said she “instantly noticed her amiable and warm-hearted personality.”

“I am in the 19th year of my teaching career and am still eager to learn,” Perez said, adding that she “could not think of anyone better to begin this step in my career, to learn and grow along with, but Juliana.”

‘Through a lot of loss’

Urtubey’s positive outlook doesn’t mean the past year hasn’t been traumatic — for families and teachers. “We’ve been through a lot of loss,” she told CBS This Morning host Gayle King, after she learned she was the winner.

In an interview with ����Ӱ��, she noted the past year has probably been the most difficult in her teaching career — a sentiment shared by those in the special education field nationally. An American Institutes for Research released last fall showed that 58 percent of districts have found it challenging to comply with the requirements of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act during the pandemic. And almost three-quarters said it was “more or substantially more difficult” to accommodate students’ individual learning needs.

Urtubey, Nevada’s first recipient of the national award, said her emphasis on students’ social and emotional connections made the loss of in-person learning less disruptive. “Our classroom community just translated over” to a remote format, she said. She worked with school nutrition staff to make sure meal distribution worked for families’ schedules and tracked down students who moved during remote learning.

Her “resilience is indicative of how hard special education teachers have worked this year,” said Dennis Cavitt, president of Council for Exceptional Children, a membership and advocacy organization. But he added that her recognition also comes as advocates are pushing for funding to address shortages of special education teachers and a lack of diversity in the workforce. President Joe Biden has asked for a $2.6 billion increase for special education.

“Having Juliana in the spotlight this year will help carry that message forward and energize the entire education community around those goals,” Cavitt said.

Urtubey said she doesn’t know if she’ll return to Booker after her year on a national stage. But she’s working with Silva and Green Our Planet to create another community garden — what she described as a “10,000-square-foot outdoor oasis” — and leave a lasting mark on the school.

“I’m definitely going to stay connected to my Booker family,” she said.

The National Teacher of the Year program is a unique fixture in America’s education landscape — an annual, highly publicized recognition of excellence in the art of teaching, complete with a national tour and a trip to the Rose Garden. One day you’re leading a tenth-grade biology seminar; the next, you’re a combination Kennedy Center honoree and a World Series winner.

The selection process continues in 2021 even in the middle of an utterly atypical school year, Nevada, North Carolina, Utah, and Washington, D.C., awaiting a final decision from the Council of Chief State School Officers, which has conferred the award since 1952. The winner will be granted access to leadership training, influential policy networks, and a platform to discuss the issues and students they care about for the next 12 months.

But where are these professional exemplars coming from? A new study examines the characteristics of Teachers of the Year over the last three decades, finding that winners disproportionately teach in schools with lower-than-average numbers of low-income kids. Both at the state and national levels, underrepresented teachers include those working with special-needs students, those who teach in elementary and middle schools, and those employed by charter schools.

Lead author Christopher Redding, a professor of educational leadership at the University of Florida, told ����Ӱ�� in an interview that little previous research focused on the selection process for Teacher of the Year. Given the rarity of education policies and institutions that place educators in leadership roles, he noted, that made it a ripe area for investigation.

“We structured the study to treat the program as something that deserves attention in and of itself,” Redding said. “You want to have a large role for teachers to be able to advocate for the profession, and at least as the program is designed now, it’s really trying to be a vehicle to accomplish that aim. So it seems like we should be asking who is going to have the opportunity to speak on behalf of the teaching profession.”

Redding and co-author Ted Myers used publicly available information to identify over 1,600 state and national Teachers of the Year — each year, the CCSSO picks finalists and an ultimate national winner from the ranks of state Teachers of the Year, who are themselves selected by their districts and state education agencies — between 1988 and 2019. Matching each winner to their respective schools, they used data from a pair of ongoing, nationwide school surveys to compare the Teachers of the Year against the wider population of American educators.

The results show that the winners, and the places they work, are disproportionately drawn from a few categories. Thirty percent of recent National Teachers of the Year have been English instructors, while 23 percent have taught social studies; those percentages are, respectively, three and four times greater than the share of those teachers in the American teaching ranks. No National Teachers of the Year have taught health, foreign languages, or career and technical education, and just one (Tabatha Rosproy, ) has been an early childhood educator.

The authors specifically cite special education staff as being overlooked; while 10 percent of teachers in their nationally representative sample worked with special-needs students, only 3 percent of state-level Teachers of the Year did. Given the pronounced differences in training, credentialing, and work responsibilities between those working in the field versus their peers in general education classrooms, the authors argue, it is reasonable to ask whether their professional concerns will find a voice in the program’s advocacy efforts.

Schools where winners worked tended to be much bigger than other schools in their state, enrolling 415 more students on average. That’s explained somewhat by the fact that Teachers of the Year are generally more likely to come from high schools — some 46 percent of all winners, compared with 20 percent of teachers nationwide. And while charter schools were underrepresented by about three percentage points among those producing Teachers of the Year, magnet schools were slightly overrepresented.

Most strikingly, schools where Teachers of the Year were selected also enrolled 8.4 percent fewer low-income students (those eligible for free and reduced-price lunch) than other schools in their state and award year. In 26 years out of 32 studied, award recipients also worked in schools with smaller shares of minority students than the state average, though the disparity in that instance was narrower (1.7 percentage points).

It’s unclear what factors might explain the trends in selection. The weight of research evidence indicates that top-performing teachers are in comparatively affluent schools and districts, while schools that disproportionately enroll more low-income and non-white students tend to hire younger staff with much less classroom experience. Whatever the cause, in Redding’s view, that demographic mismatch raises the question of whether the Teacher of the Year program — one of only a few elevating the voices of school employees, and by far the most prominent — can fully represent the views of most teachers.

“What stands out the most is that it does really seem like teachers from high-poverty schools are less likely to be selected,” he noted. “If that shapes the issues that are being [raised], it underrepresents the ones that might be of most concern to teachers working in high-poverty schools.”

Over the last few years, National Teachers of the Year have increasingly found themselves either willing or reluctant participants in the national conversation around education politics. When Boston charter school teacher Sydney Chaffee received the award in 2017, members of the Massachusetts Teachers Association voted down a motion to offer her congratulations even though she was the state’s first national winner. More recently, 2019 National Teacher of the Year Rodney Robinson Donald Trump after the president declined to attend his award ceremony in person. He has for tweeting out a joke calling for violence against Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConell.

But the most famous example is that of 2016 winner Jahana Hayes, who used her year of notoriety to begin a political career that has now taken her to Congress.

Sarah Brown Wessling, the interim director of the National Teacher of the Year program (and herself the 2010 National Teacher of the Year), told ����Ӱ�� via email that the Council of Chief State School Officers was “constantly striving to improve the program and our supports to teachers.”

“CCSSO is proud of state efforts to diversify the selection of State Teachers of the Year, and of the national Selection Committee’s attention to selecting finalists and National Teachers of the Year who can represent teachers and students across the country. Recent National Teachers of the Year have taught in a variety of settings representative of America’s schools and students, from preschoolers in a small town to immigrant and refugee high school students in larger cities.”

Juliana Urtubey — pre-K-to-5 special education teacher from the Clark County School District in Nevada — is the National Teacher of the Year, the Council of Chief State School Officers today on CBS This Morning.

First lady Jill Biden surprised Urtubey at Booker Elementary School to make the announcement.

Urtubey works with classroom teachers to improve instruction for students with special needs. 

“I get to be part of a whole new world with so many students,” she told host Gayle King about her love for teaching, adding that her students “have made that same kind of impact on my life.”

John Arthur, Utah’s Teacher of the Year, recently received a visit from a former student at Meadowlark Elementary School in Salt Lake City. Addressing him as “Captain” — the nickname students gave him based on a manga character — the eighth grader didn’t mince words.

“What’s it like being the teacher of the worst year ever?” he asked.

Arthur emphasized the positive. He worked on becoming more dynamic, using song, dance and stories to maintain his students’ interest during the long, lonely days of Zoom. And on Wednesdays, he and a few students jump in his car after school to deliver math and science materials and meals to the doorsteps of students learning from home.

“I got into this out of a love of teaching,” said Arthur, whose parents wanted him to become a doctor. “I believe in public service, and never will that service mean more than it does this year.”

Arthur — along with Alejandro Diasgranados of the District of Columbia, Maureen Stover of North Carolina and Juliana Urtubey of Nevada — are candidates for National Teacher of the Year, which the Council of Chief State School Officers is expected to announce this week. In their own way, each would likely echo Arthur’s sentiment: Even the best educators had to learn new skills this past year to connect with students.

“We are welcomed guests in families’ homes. We got to peek in and see what it looks like,” said Urtubey, a pre-K-5 special education teacher who supports 10 classrooms at Booker Elementary School in the Clark County School District, which includes Las Vegas.

She watched a mother, father, grandmother and cousin take turns helping a student with autism during distance learning so the responsibility wouldn’t fall on one family member, and witnessed other parents upend their work schedules to stay home with their children.

“Not a day goes by that a teacher doesn’t tell me something awesome their families did,” Urtubey said.

She was trained as a bilingual teacher in Arizona — just as the state implemented Proposition 203, requiring English as the only language of instruction.She gravitated to special education because of a provision in the law allowing students with disabilities to receive bilingual services.

One day, she had an “aha” moment about the potential of all students to learn: She caught a fifth grader, who couldn’t read at a kindergarten level, “running a business out of his backpack.” He sold pencils, erasers and snacks, keeping a balance sheet to track revenues and expenses.

“He planted a seed,” she said. “I was like, ‘OK, let’s figure out a way to use this for academic intervention.’”

Unlocking the magic

At Cumberland International Early College High School, located on the campus of Fayetteville State University, a lot of Stover’s students enter ninth grade needing intervention. The state’s early college high schools target students from underrepresented minority groups in line to be the first in their families to attend college.

The students who thrive in the model are “motivated, but behind,” Stover said. “There is magic in them that we can unlock.”

A former intelligence officer in the U.S. Air Force who served in the Middle East, Stover teaches biology, environmental science and a class that prepares students for college. When her students transitioned to distance learning, the casual interactions she shared with them in the classroom and eating lunch together in the student union stopped.

Over Zoom, many clammed up. She encouraged them to bring their pets on screen and gave them a virtual tour of the raised beds in her backyard, using the outdoors to spark conversation and teach a lesson on photosynthesis.

One outcome of remote learning, she said, is that students have learned some “digital citizenship,” such as not showing their house number on social media and recognizing that a classmate’s joke in the chat field can sometimes be taken the wrong way.

They’ve collaborated on projects remotely through videos and documents. For years, educators would talk about 21st century skills, but “it always felt really forced,” Stover said. “Now my kids have those skills.”

‘Their voice can make change’

In northeast D.C., Diasgranados’s fourth and fifth graders at Aiton Elementary School have sharpened advocacy skills they’ve been learning since second grade when he began moving with them from one grade to the next.

A letter from the students explaining that many lacked devices for remote learning caught the attention of a producer for The Drew Barrymore Show on CBS. In October, Barrymore featured Diasgranados as a guest and for every student and staff member.

In past years, his students have written to the Washington Football Team, explaining how unwashed clothes contribute to chronic absenteeism. The $10,000 for a school laundry. And when Washington Capitals forward Devante Smith-Pelly faced racist taunts at a game in Chicago, the students wrote him letters of support. Smith-Pelly visited the school and donated coats to the students.

“My students are activists,” Diasgranados said. “They really understand their writing and their voice can make change.”

Unlike most teachers this school year, Diasgranados didn’t have to form new relationships with students he’s never taught before. He already had numbers for grandparents, aunts and uncles he called when he couldn’t find students during the early months of the pandemic.

But teaching remotely in one of D.C.’s poorest neighborhoods — even with the laptop donation — was no less challenging. As children of essential workers, a lot of his students have had to connect to school from their parents’ jobs or a city bus.

Aiton was holding a talent show March 13 last year when texts about school shutting down began pouring in. Diasgranados started to get emotional and gave more hugs and took more selfies than normal.

“They didn’t really understand what was going on,” he said. “I remember telling them to take as many books home as they could.”

Lead Art: Alejandro Diasgranados, Juliana Urtubey, John Arthur and Maureen Stover. (Council of Chief State School Officers)