School employees from Clovis, Sanger named Fresno County Educators of the Year

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Good morning everyone! It’s Lasherica with The Bee’s Education Lab. It’s Wednesday, Nov. 23. Happy Thanksgiving Eve!

Last week, the Fresno County Superintendent of Schools honored two Clovis Unified educators and a Sanger Unified educator with the 2022 Educator of the Year award in categories for school employee, administrator and teacher.

The school Employee of the Year was Clovis Unified’s Gabriel Hughes, a student relations liaison at Weldon Elementary and Clark Intermediate School. Working in education for nine years, Hughes wanted to give back to the youth.

“I teach my students to be patient with those who are different from them and give them skills to overcome these obstacles,” he said.

Jason Stricker, the director of Pupil Services for Sanger Unified, was named Administrator of the Year. He has worked in education for 15 years.

“I believe a key educational issue that is more important than ever following the pandemic and disruption to learning has been the inclusion of students who lack readiness for classroom success,” Stricker said.

Clovis East High School’s Career Technical Education teacher Kelly Eichmann, a 22-year educator, was named Teacher of the Year.

“I am a teacher with consistently high standards and will help students to discover their potential,” Eichmann said about her role. “When the teacher expects the best from students and then lovingly mentors them to achieve, they transform young people with elevated self-esteem, self-respect and a can-do attitude.”

Each can now apply for the state’s Department of Education awards.

Congratulations again and enjoy this week off!

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MORE FRESNO-AREA EDUCATION NEWS

Teach Plus California, a national nonprofit that empowers teachers to improve educational policy and practice those policies, selected a Los Banos Unified School District teacher to be a part of its 24-member cohort this school year.

Along with the other program fellows, Sergio de Alba from R. M. Miano Elementary will be trained in policy, advocacy, research and communications. Fellows were chosen for their “strong commitment to the classroom and to equity, their ability to articulate the needs of their students, and their pursuit of excellence and innovation in their teaching,” a media release said.

According to Teach Plus, the cohort will specifically focus on issues that are important to educators, students and parents including: creation of a culturally affirming and anti-racist school climate, educator well-being, strategies for ensuring an excellent, empowered, and diverse teaching force, and high quality cultural responsive instructional materials.”

“If California is to transform our schools and ensure we are fostering the potential of all of our students to succeed, we must look to our best and brightest educators to lead that transformation,“ Sarah Lillis, Teach Plus California Executive Director, said.

Merced College plans to double its number of available spots for nursing students.

Each semester 30 students are trained through a partnership with Mercy Medical Center. By renewing a previous partnership with Emanuel Medical Center, 30 more students – 60 in all – will be trained each semester.

“As a community college, our success, and that of our students, requires strong partnerships with businesses, organizations and health care providers to create new opportunities for students and address community needs,” Merced College President Chris Vitelli said. “We are proud of our partnership with Mercy, and our renewed partnership with Emanuel will benefit our students, our hospitals, and all local residents who are in need of care.”

Alpha Alpha Alpha Honor Society, a national honor society for first-generation students, started a chapter at Fresno Pacific University when it recently inducted 63 students, eight faculty and five staff members.

The university considered the honor society “natural” for FPU as 49% of Fresno Pacific students are the first in their families to attend college.

The Fresno Rural Teacher Residency Program, a program under the Office of the Fresno County Superintendent of Schools, won two state awards recently: the California School Boards Association Golden Bell Award, which is open to all preK-12 public school programs, and the Apple for Excellence Award as an outstanding program administered by a county office of education.

The program intends to recruit, retain and support a teacher workforce for students of “similar geographic, cultural, linguistic and low-income backgrounds, predominantly Hispanic immigrant and migrant populations, who have historically had limited access to resources due to geographic isolation.”

The program supports these teachers by providing equity-driven professional development and mentoring them.

In its first year, the program recruited 19 residents; 80% identified as Latinx and 60% said they were from a rural community. Upon completion of the program, 74% were hired by the program’s rural district residency partners and neighboring rural districts. Two residents, 10.5%, applied to more urban districts.

“This is a model program in our state,” the FCSS office said. “Data analysis suggests that the Rural Residency approach to teacher preparation shows promise for increasing the quality and diversity of the rural teacher pipeline.”

UC Merced, as well as UC Santa Cruz, became the first campuses in more than 50 years to be named an agricultural experiment station, according to a media release.

An agricultural experiment station is a scientific research center at a university that explores challenges and develops improvements in agriculture by working with farmers, ranchors, suppliers, processors and others.

With the designation, a campus can get additional funding from the university’s budget for agricultural research and better compete for research grants.

UC Merced joins UC Berkeley, UC Davis and UC Riverside, which have the designation already.

“Our campus has been working toward this designation for several years and it really enhances the UC’s already considerable and potentially world-changing research,” UC Merced Chancellor Juan Sánchez Muñoz said. “It also helps fulfill the promise of the campus being located in Merced because so much of our research in agriculture is directly applicable to the communities of the San Joaquin Valley.”

That’s it for this week’s newsletter! Make sure to share this with people you know or even on social media with people you don’t know as much.