For many years, the Rotary Club of Knoxville has selected two outstanding educators from the Knox County School System to be selected as the as the Rotary Club of Knoxville’s 2024 Outstanding Teachers of the Year. This Tuesday we continued this recognition based on the recommendations from our Education Recognition Committee, chaired by Lynne Fugate.
The first honoree in the elementary/intermediate category was Alex Roushdi, Special Education Teacher at Amherst Elementary. Out of the seven hundred students at Amherst Elementary there are 140 in special education classes there. Alex has been in this role since 2014 and you can tell this is her passion. Alex’s goal is “Success for Every Student” for all K-5th Grade students at Amherst. She realizes it takes a team collaborating with her to reach this goal, and she’s very thankful for the teaching assistants, the speech therapist, the school nurse, and all support staff plus parents that work together as a team to make sure that every student can succeed.
She realizes that students learn in many different ways. For instance, some students use sign language, some with pictures, and some use special “talkers” to communicate. One of the impactful ways that Alex does is getting students integrated into public settings. For example, she mentioned a program that she called “Class-giving Day.” This is a day where the students are going to prepare a “Class-giving Day” meal. They are given a list of items they need to purchase from the grocery store, so Alex and her team take students on a field trip to the grocery store where students use their list to locate and then purchase those items. When they checkout at the register, they learn how to pay for the items and how to communicate with the attendant. The following day they come back and help prepare meals with the food they purchased for others at the school. This teaches them valuable life skills and shows them how they can serve others.
Representing the middle/high school category was Mitchell Moore, Choir Teacher at Farragut High School. Mitchell started at Farragut during the challenging year of 2020 when students were singing through masks and doing virtual concerts. One of Mitchell’s goals is to help build community among the students there at Farragut High, specifically with his choir students. The number of students involved in choir when he joined Farragut was quite small but this year there were 191 students that wanted to join one of seven choirs that Mitchell oversees. In just four years, the choirs had seventy-four formal performances including appearances at Carnegie Hall and performing for the Tennessee State Senate and are taking a trip to Ireland in 2025. Mitchell also coordinated a unique event when all Farragut schools in K-12th grades combined for a concert as one large choir to help the younger students learn about more about music and build a sense of community as they progress to high school. As he attempts to create this sense of community, they want to create better human beings who can learn to connect with their own emotions, to connect with each other, and to empathize with other students. Another motto they have for the choir members is to always “Leave It Better Than You Found It.” Mitchell reminded us in closing that “Future Leaders Are in Rehearsal Today.”
With Outstanding Teachers of the Year like Alex and Mitchell, we should all be pleased that future leaders and future Rotary Club members are being shaped today with teachers like them. Hats off to the challenging work they do every day to give of themselves to the lives of students and compliment the work of their parents and caregivers.