Skip to main content

Creating Transformational Change Starts Here

Get to know our 2017-2018 corps members and learn more about how they are impacting education in Idaho.

By The TFA Editorial Team

September 18, 2018

“Teach For America supplies quality candidates for hard-to-fill positions and follows up with the necessary mentoring to grow these educational professionals.”

Superintendent Robin Gilbert, Payette School District

This year, Teach For America-Idaho is proud to work with 40 corps members,  its largest corps since our founding in 2015. Our corps members are selected from a highly competitive pool of candidates and commit to teaching in some of Idaho’s most needy communities.

Infographic of Idaho Corps Members in 2017-2018

Over two thirds of TFA-Idaho current corps members are teaching high-needs subjects, which are historically the hardest to fill. These include placements in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) courses and special education in communities such as Nampa, Caldwell, Payette, Homedale and Garden City to name a few.

Many of these teachers boast impressive academic and social emotional growth in their students.

Caitlin Hughes (Idaho ‘17) is one of those teachers. Ms. Hughes encourages all of her eighth grade students to believe in their ability to be mathematicians. Last year, her students grew twice as much as typical eighth grade math students from their fall to spring assessments on average. One student, recognized as “Mathematician of the Year,” began the school year performing below grade level and in remediation math class, but through her class he grew more than four times the average and will now enter high school above grade level.

“Some students don’t believe they can do math, or say, ‘math is hard so I don’t like it.’ In my classroom we accept that math requires lots of work but believe we can do it together.”

Another corps member, Maggie Chapman (Idaho ‘18), left her job as a software engineer at Amazon to join the corps. Ms. Chapman is using the skills she developed at Tufts University and Amazon to educate her students at Caldwell High in computer science.

“Right now there are 500,000 open computing jobs in the US, and 1,773 of them are in Idaho. At the same time there are only 333 computer science graduates to fill these roles. Moreover, jobs in all fields are using technology and computing more and more. My role is show students that computing is fun and exciting, and teach them foundational skills.”

 

To learn more about our corps members and the work they are doing in Idaho visit our 2017-2018 Annual Report.

You can also read more about Maggie’s journey on our website.