KENTUCKY
TEACHER OF THE YEAR
2022 Valvoline Teacher Achievement Award Winners
Click on the images below for details about the winners!
Aaron Klausing
Anna Schneider
Cindy Hundley
Heather Dipasquale
Jamie Reagan
Jason Hand
Jennifer Howard
Jennifer Sims
Jessica Gels
Jo Pennington
Jodie Carnes
Judy Trunnell
Kandi Dawson
Lauren Coffey
Margaret Brewer
Matthew Haynes
Miranda Newland
Morgan Preston
Nick Harris
Steffanie Skiles
Troy Chafin
© Valvoline. All rights reserved
© Valvoline. All rights reserved
Ashley Ritchie, a 2nd grade teacher from Beechwood Elementary in Beechwood Independent schools, is the 2022 Elementary Teacher of the Year.
|Ashley believes that relationships should be at the heart of every teachert’s “why.” To her, building relationships with students, even amid a pandemic, is all worth it for those moments when her studentst’ light bulbs go off.
Ashley uses room transformations to engage all students in the learning process, which involves transforming her classroom into something new and different that centers around the learning standards. Over the years, she has transformed her classroom into the Oregon Trail, a bat cave, a football field, a mad scientist lab and a pirate ship.
When it comes to education extending beyond the classroom, Ashley gets her students involved in their community by having them perform their musical production for a local nursing home. With COVID safety precautions in place, they couldnt’t take the show on the road this year, but still taped their performance and shared the recording and message of hope to the local elderly community.
Hallie Booth, an 8th-grade science teacher at Ballyshannon Middle School in Boone County is the 2022 Middle School Teacher of the Year.
Hallie focuses her classroom on exploration and giving students real-world experiences. Influenced by one of her childhood educators, she creates partnership opportunities with individuals in the scientific community to help apply her student’s knowledge. When developing each unit around the idea of exploration, she has students identify the direction of their exploration and plan what they will need to do in order to research their ideas and solutions. She then connects her students with researchers, scientists, engineers and other professionals that help them accomplish their solutions and provide feedback. These opportunities have influenced some of her students to go on and pursue careers in wildlife protection or genetics research based on connections made in her classroom.
Social and emotional learning also is an important part of Hallie’s classroom culture. Through breathing exercises and discussions on how to deal with overwhelming emotions, this teacher helps her students understand their emotions and how to react to them.
One of her colleagues said Hallie’s biggest strength is that she teaches people, not just science. She takes the time to meet her audience where they are and yet still manages to bring them across the finish line no matter where they started.
Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr., 2022 Kentucky High School Teacher of the Year, is a French and English teacher at Montgomery County High.
Willie aims to center students voices and advocate for them in and out of the classroom. In 2021, Willie worked alongside a professor at a neighboring university to produce a 600-page draft of a textbook that will be made available to all their students for free. He tirelessly researched linguistic and phonetic elements of the text that will give students the greatest chance at comprehension and simplified many of the concepts introduced.
Nothing excites Willie more than student initiative. Working alongside his students, they created the Happy Club, a student-led group that focuses on making the school a better place. Students distribute random messages at lunch, including recipes for biscuits, vocabulary words and facts about kangaroos. They gave out baskets for students to put extra breakfast food in for their hungry classmates and created a Post-It wall with affirmations. A year after its formation, the Happy Club created a second club called Open Light, the county’s first inclusion club and outwardly LGBT-affirming club.
One student said that “Mr. Carver is living proof that when someone believes in you, when someone cares about you, things can and will get better.”