It’s National Teacher Appreciation Week, and today’s guest post is from Birmingham Education Foundation Executive Director J.W. Carpenter. (Photos courtesy of Birmingham Education Foundation.)
I worry.
I worry that by mentioning specific teachers in this blog post about Teacher Appreciation Week that I am going to leave several deserving people out. There are far too many good teachers in our classrooms for me to mention here. I see them every day in the Birmingham City Schools.
I think about Rebecca Padin at Tuggle Elementary School, who spends all day teaching at Tuggle and still has time outside of the classroom to help organize after-school meetings to connect her school to badly needed resources. Or Kristie Williams at Carver High School, who runs two different career academies and is constantly riding with her students to and from competitions, meetings and visits to businesses because she knows that those are the experiences that will make a huge difference in their future careers.
I think about Laura West at Hudson K-8, who had her class write to President Obama and received a response. Talk about the memory of a lifetime for middle school students. It could be Sandreka Brown at Malachi Wilkerson Middle School, who writes grants so her students can experience afterschool programming, or Tommy Lyas at Ramsay High School and Nikki Machokoto at Wenonah, who are partnering with UAB and Birmingham-
Southern respectively to bring professors and graduate students into their classrooms because their students deserve the best.
What about Mr. Brown at Huffman High, who makes sure his students have access to multiple layers of resources in the Architecture & Design Academy and also took his students to see President Obama when he spoke recently at Lawson State? I haven’t even mentioned the great principals and assistant principals who may not be in the classroom anymore, but are creating the cultures that bring urban teaching farms, cutting-edge ACT prep programs, and high-level AP resources to their students. Our best principals go to war for their teachers and make their successes possible.
Every single day, our teachers reach into their pockets – often for money they don’t always have – to support students in need. They reach deeper into their hearts for those same kids – kids that many others have given up on, but who these teachers never will. You do not hear them complain about lack of resources or time. They make do with what they have to ensure their kids have every opportunity available to them. More and more, they 
are making incredible things happen with less and less. I am privileged to get to see them, work with them, support them. They are among our community’s best leaders.
I don’t do enough. I don’t say thank you enough, and one week is certainly far from enough to celebrate these inspiring men and women. If I had a charge for our community, it is for every person not just to say thank you, but to begin spending more time listening to our great teachers. Too often, education summits, leadership conferences, and decision-making entities have one sad commonality: there are no teachers present. Not because they were too busy to come or because they don’t care – it’s because the meetings were held at times when they could not attend. That is how we end up doing things to and for teachers, rather than with them.
I bet if we listened a little bit more, we would find that they have a lot of the wisdom that we’ve been seeking as a community about how to best serve our students. Let’s make sure that we are treating them like the high-level community leaders they are and including them in the decisions we are making not just for our schools, but for this community. That would be the year-long thank you they deserve.