Jackie Weerda

Jackie Weerda of Rockton teaches Kindergarten at Roscoe’s Ledgewood Elementary, where she’s been 15 of her 20 years as an educator. A student’s parent wrote “You can just see the love she has for teaching just by the way she lights up whatever room she is in. The amount of patience that she has is incredible. Thanks to her, my son looks forward to going to school every day with a big smile on his face and comes home every day to tell me about what activities Mrs. Weerda’s classroom did and what they learned.” Jackie says her “everyday reflective thinking, my pledge to teaching, protecting and loving my students, furthering my own education and spreading my nephew’s joy and love of learning well beyond my classroom [through the Jack Baumann Memorial] is eliciting students who are excited to come to school, work hard, tackle challenges and meet high expectations.” She starts the year getting to know as much as she can about students and their families. A fellow teacher whose children Jackie taught shared that she was touched by how she “encouraged my son’s curiosity about animals and nature and my daughter’s interests in fairies and music. Her willingness to get to know them as individuals motivated them to do their best and they thrived academically.” Jackie will often proactively consult with families, social workers, counselors and other teachers and staff when she sees a need to provide unique accommodation to a student. Fair is not always equal. Jackie explains this to students, telling them, “everyone in my classroom gets to learn, and in order to do our best learning, some people need different things.” She provides the example that to read, she needs glasses. To succeed, some students need to chew gum to focus or need to sit in a wiggle chair. Her students may be Mexican, Middle-Eastern or Caucasian or have Autism, AD/HD, anxiety, language delays or learning disabilities. Her lessons for and expectations of her students will vary depending on their needs and abilities. She says, “challenging students is about finding out exactly what a student is capable of and then pushing him to his own highest potential.” An observer noted that the learning challenges in the classroom were not obvious as the “teacher handled everyone perfectly.” Jackie relayed an instance in which she struggled to reach a student who entered the classroom mid-year. The student wasn’t participating, making friends or making any progress. She collaborated on observing the student’s behavior in both large and small groups to see if shyness was the problem. It wasn’t. Jackie persisted. She saw the student wasn’t responding to oral instruction; she watched other students’ actions then repeated them. Jackie referred the student to the school nurse, who confirmed her suspicion: the child had a hearing impairment that had not been diagnosed or addressed. After that, the student started participating, connecting with peers and making academic progress. Jackie is committed to enriching the whole child so that her students will “finish their kindergarten year with increased confidence, a strong grasp of kindergarten academic concepts and a lifelong excitement about learning.” Principal Chad Etnyre says that because Jackie “works hard on the front-end [meeting their functional and social-emotional levels], students thrive from her instructional delivery throughout the year and they are much more likely to reach their potential.” He added that Jackie contributes to the educational environment unselfishly – allowing a great school to become even better.”