From Staff Reports
Each spring each local Jefferson County School nominates a candidate to be Teacher of the Year (TOTY.) The district’s foundation organizes a banquet underwritten by McDonald’s to honor those top teachers at the Florentine Building in downtown Birmingham. In late April or early May, a state TOTY will be named as well as an alternate.
Local nominees include:
Stacy Curl – Chalkville Elementary
Stacy Curl, a third grade teacher at Chalkville Elementary was her school’s choice for TOTY.
Curl received her bachelor’s degree at Troy State University in 2003 and her masters degree from UAB in 2009. She leads many teacher training sessions and serves on many local and district curriculum teams such as Project Based learning, student discourse, language arts in elementary, Alabama Quality Teaching Standards, and Global Scholar teacher-created test training.
Curl considers student discourse in reading to be her greatest contribution in education. She implemented newly learned strategies in her classroom and saw more growth in a single year than she had ever seen. Then she met with grade-level teams, visiting each session as the team trained their grade levels, which created a shift in thinking at the school.
“Smart phones and tablets are the devices of choice for students and due to the amount of time children are using technology at home, they now have a constant desire to be entertained,” said Curl, who consideres technology a major teaching issue.
Kristy Lott – Clay Elementary
Music teacher Kristy Lott received a bachelor of music at the University of North Alabama in 2000, her masters of vocal pedagogy from Belmont University, and her certification in Orff-Schulwerk Level in 2012. Before coming to Clay, she taught at two junior highs, two high schools, taught piano or voice at two academies, and a special needs summer program. She has been her school’s choice for TOTY five different times.
“In order to make a well-rounded curriculum work in an academic-driven curriculum, I feel that it is important for teachers in every subject to take on the weight of this pressure to achieve. Using cross-curricular teaching greatly reinforces what students are learning in all subjects,” said Lott.
Renitta C. McKinstry – Center Point Elementary
Renitta McKinstry has taught first grade at Center Point Elementary since 2007. Before that she was at W.J. Christian Magnet School and for five years at The Elmer and Glenda Harris Early Learning Center.
After losing her Mother at seven months old due to a head-on collision by a drunk driver and having an absent father, Renitta knew that teaching had to be a calling. She wanted to be that person who instilled in children that it’s not what you’re called, rather, what you answer to.
“Rigor, relevance, results, and relationship: drive me on a day to day basis,” says Renitta and she believes that her expectations for her students, their parents and the community are by far her greatest contributions and accomplishments in education.
Dana Jacobson – Clay-Chalkville High School
Dana Jacobson has been at Clay-Chalkville High since 1999. She teaches English 9-11, ACT prep, debate, speech, homebound, creative writing, and history of film. Before that for three years she taught English as a second language and business English and cultural acclimation and designed a high school writing curriculum in Kyoto, Japan for a girls’ high school.
She has won numerous foundation grants, been a presenter at state and district conventions, and served on the Governor’s Congress on School Leadership Task Force in 2005.
“I begin with the end in mind, using backwards design and project-based learning with real-world
application. I am the best teacher when students are discussing, presenting, questioning, and critiquing, and I am observing.”
In addition to work with Studio by the Tracks, Boy Scouts, and becoming a Girl Scouts leader, she works tirelessly with the National Conference on Community and Justice and the Birmingham Pledge Foundation for real-world application and real-world solutions affecting school. For 15 years, she has worked to deepen the calligraphy and the book arts community from local to international levels, by designing a year-long curriculum, locating instructors, and marketing the course.