In my childhood and adolescence, I spent years being told I wasn't capable of much. Growing up with ADHD and executive function disorder, I was labeled 'lazy' and 'an underperformer' by teachers and school staff who told me they didn't understand why I couldn't do things. My 7th and 8th grade English teacher told me on one occasion that I would never amount to anything before she just started ignoring my presence in her classroom. For a very long time, their words settled into me; permeating my idea of self like a weed taking hold- growing in the lack of sunlight. I worked hard to shrink myself so that I would attract silence instead of criticism on the parts of me I couldn't or didn't have the answer for. I felt lucky when I graduated high school with a 1.9 GPA. I enrolled in a community college, and then transferred to a small college that served students with disabilities such as mine- I failed out of both within one semester. For the next 3 years, I conducted some self discovery. I began working in the fast-paced service industry, forcing the development of multi-tasking and time management skills. I worked with a psychiatrist to get my medication in order and spoke with them about what the medicine does on a neurological level. Eventually, I decided to return to a new community college and began taking classes with one goal in mind, to teach special education to students who need that support and to be the adult who forms relationships with students who have no one else to champion them. Since graduating college in 2014 with a 3.95 GPA and a new mission, I've worked in both private and public schools for students with a wide variety of disabilities. Each year, I recognize a version of myself in my students, many of whom define themselves by what is wrong with them instead of their myriad of strengths and potential. Harold Bloom wrote that the purpose of teaching is to bring a student to a sense of their own presence. I understand this as helping a student recognize that they exist as a full person in the room with a mind and a worth that a disability doesn't get to define. For these students, presence and confidence are the first two things sacrificed in an environment that focuses on test scores and benchmarks. Students are recognized for their accommodations before they get called by their names, and they often learn to describe themselves through a list of deficits- or shrink down to fit them- before they get a chance to recognize what they can do. I strive to change that. When I meet a new student, I always look for what they're drawn to first before I recognize the struggles in practice. I've written and received three education grants, including funding for flexible seating and for emotional regulation instruction, because specific students needed specific tools to access the classroom and curriculum that others are able to access so easily. I am an NJHS advisor and have worked with students on projects like our yearly Little Feet Meet with Special Olympics and on a yearly "Be Kind" sign campaign that a private individual has been carrying across the Virginia area. Projects like these give students of all abilities proof that they belong somewhere and that their ideas and character matter past the grade on a report card. Being present for these students also means explaining to these students that the traits that get them in trouble could be beneficial later in life. My current graduate coursework in the area of gifted and talented recognizes the impulsivity and overexcitabilities as gifted potential, which may not be recognized in a K-12 institution. My goal is to take this further at a systems level. I would like to work with districts, HR departments, and school administrators to rebuild how consequences are handled. Most schools rely on in-school and out-of-school suspension, which teaches a student that misbehavior earns time away from instruction and that these students have to earn their place in their peer community. Research has tied these placements to higher rates of later incarceration, and furthermore the students who often receive these placements are disproportionally students with disabilities and students of color. I aim to build alternative learning centers where a removed student still receives instruction, including special education services, alongside restorative work such as reflecting on the impact of their behavior, contributing to the school building through service, and rebuilding their place in the community. Instruction paired with restoration gives a student a way back into the room instead of building a disconnection from it. This, to me, is what it means to help a student find their own presence and voice. It gives the students a way back to themselves and a way into the community around them again and again until they stop needing to be shown. Instead of a fairy tale, I would like to submit an autobiographical poem: Learning to Cry Quietly I’m five years old and everything feels so big I can’t help my angry, my sad, my scared My joy is too much and I need to “calm down”. The whole world feels like Life or Death Fight or Flight I scream because I can’t color my picture just the way I expect myself to My mom tries to help me feel better But I get more angry I yell at mom and now she’s upset and I cry because Now I am angry and I’ve made my mom sad. At bedtime, she kisses me on the head but I quietly cry. I keep replaying that morning when I yelled, I wonder if she replayed it too. She tells me that she loves me and that One day my feelings will be easier, that I won’t feel so much. She leaves my room as I protest I want her to know that I’m not scared of The darkness or the monsters But being alone. I feel her exhaustion And maybe annoyance each time she comes up Responding to my cries So I learn to cry quietly soft enough so she can’t hear And she tells me she’s so proud of me. I wonder if she means it for herself, too. I don’t feel proud. I’m eight years old and I spend hours learning every song I can on Our old upright piano To not just reproduce the sounds I love but to manipulate them in my own way I wait until everyone is out of the house and Play for hours My dad asks why I never play for him anymore. I feel shame and embarrassment not from the worry of criticism but from the Praise and applause he gives like I am Chopin reincarnated or the Rolling Stones And it makes me feel like He must be lying or he must be hoping that One day I live up to his expectation. I know he’s trying to connect And I feel like an imposter I’m eleven years old and I’m starting middle school I feel like I'm on a television set Where the audience sees my awkward Where I'm not a part of the jokes that spark The laugh track or resounding “ooh”s. My teacher plays a documentary about Starving children in Guatemala and people Stare at me when I cry. She asks if I need to step out of the room which feels More like instructions than suggestion so I leave I cry in the hallway for children I will never meet And feel heat from each set of eyes judging me As I stare at the ground and wait for the bell And I wonder if everyone feels this alone Or if my teacher cried too the first time she watched it And I feel so alone I’m fifteen and it’s my junior year I am captain of the swim team and everyone Looks to me for advice on technique on how to Shave 2 seconds off of their fly They don’t know that I plan to quit before our next meet I can’t handle the sick-to-my-stomach feeling I get before the start of each race The 10 minutes before my heat begins Is the most excruciating feeling, it feels like Life or Death Fight or Flight I can’t stand the smell of chlorine or The wet matted hair under my cap and When the coach tells me that I’m the only one Who is willing to do the 500-yard freestyle event it Doesn’t matter how many ribbons i get I feel like an outsider I’m thirty-one and I have two kids who call me “mom” and One hundred and fifty more who ask me questions Like “how do I solve for x?” And “why don’t I feel like I’m good enough?” And I tell all of them that I don’t have the answer yet But I know that the feeling you can’t ignore The one that makes you cry In hallways For people you’ll never meet Is not the thing that’s wrong with you.

I have been a special education teacher for eleven years. I came to it the long way. I grew up being labeled more than understood, failed out of college because I had started to believe what people said about me, and eventually went back with a specific purpose: I wanted to teach special education and be the person that students who weren't being seen could form a real relationship with, especially students with disabilities like mine. I graduated with the highest GPA in my School of Education. My original goal has not changed, it has just gotten larger than one classroom. In eleven years I have worked in private schools for students with disabilities and in public elementary, middle, and high schools. I have managed everything from learning disabilities and other health impairments to autism and emotional disability. I have written and received three separate education grants, participated in a Virginia Department of Education inclusion audit, and helped revise and publish policy and procedure for special education at the district level. I have been invited onto hiring panels for administrators, directors, and teachers. I say this not to list accomplishments but to explain that I have spent over a decade learning how these systems work from the inside, and what I have learned is that for certain students, the system is not working. What I keep watching happen is this: a student gets removed from class, sits in a room or goes home, loses instruction, and returns having missed both the content and any real conversation about what led them there. Research connects disciplinary placements directly to increased likelihood of incarceration. The consequence teaches students that the response to struggle is absence, and in many cases it teaches the school the same thing. I want to work with districts to build something different. Specifically, I want to develop alternative learning centers where students who are removed from their classrooms continue receiving instruction, including special education services they are legally entitled to, and participate in restorative practices that ask them to reflect on what happened, consider the impact on the people around them, and reinvest in their school community in concrete ways. Helping care for the building. Working alongside staff. Turning removal into reconnection rather than disappearance. This is not a new idea in theory, but in practice it is almost nonexistent and the students who suffer most from that gap are the ones who were already the furthest from the center of how schools are designed. To me, this goal is personal. I know what it is like to be a student with real capability who is told, in ways both direct and indirect, that the things that make you different are the things that will hold you back. I also know what it means to eventually find people and purposes that reframe that story. That reframing is not something every student gets, and the ones who don't are not less deserving of it. The work I want to do is not separate from the work I have already been doing. It is the next version of it, operating at a scale where it can reach students before a single teacher, however committed, is able to get to them.

My mother worked full time as a nurse practitioner while raising four children, including a set of twins. She came home after long shifts to a house that needed her in every direction at once. And still, she found the time to read books and magazine articles about ADHD, about how it changes the brain, about strategies that might help a daughter who was struggling in ways that most adults in that daughter's life had stopped trying to understand. I remember sitting at the dinner table with her after she had just gotten off work. I was crying, fighting the math homework that would not cooperate with my brain no matter how hard I tried. She sat with me and walked through it step by step, patient and calm, as though she had nowhere else to be. She was not performing patience. She was teaching it to me by giving it to me first. There were harder moments. Every year she hand-sewed four Halloween costumes, hours of careful work spread across weeks. One afternoon I walked into the laundry room with a pair of scissors and cut into all of them. That is the part that is difficult to explain about emotional dysregulation to someone who has not lived it. It is not defiance. It is a brain that moves faster than consequence, faster than love. There were times she held me in a full bear hug while I kicked and screamed, completely overtaken by whatever storm had taken hold, and she just held on until it passed. Then she sat with me and restored things. Not with a lecture. Not with punishment. She repaired the relationship first, every time, and trusted that the lesson would follow. Outside our house, the world was less forgiving. Teachers said out loud they didn't understand why I couldn't do things. My mother never believed that. She kept going to conferences, kept trying to tell my teachers about the parts of me they couldn't see in 45 minutes a day. That I was empathetic and artistic and driven. That I had a moral compass that pointed somewhere real. Most of them were not interested. She never stopped insisting that the whole picture mattered anyway. I graduated high school with a 1.9 GPA and failed out of college... twice. For a long time I believed every message that told me I was not built for anything more. Eventually I found my footing. I went back to school with a clear purpose and graduated from the University of Lynchburg with the highest GPA in the School of Education. I became a special education teacher and have spent eleven years in that work, in private and public schools, with students whose disabilities range from learning disabilities and ADHD to autism and emotional disability. I have written and received three education grants, participated in state level inclusion audits, and helped rewrite district special education policy from the ground up. Now I am returning to graduate school for my Masters of Educational Leadership with an endorsement in gifted education, because I have seen enough of this system to know where it is broken and I believe I know how to help fix it. I want to work with districts from within to replace punitive removal with restorative alternative learning centers, spaces that keep students in instruction, connect them to services, and build accountability that repairs rather than discards. I did not get here alone. The way I sit with a student who is melting down and cannot explain why, the way I fight for the whole picture of a child rather than just the part that is causing problems, the way I believe that restoration matters more than punishment, I learned all of that from a woman who had every reason to be too tired and chose not to be. She taught me that belief is not a feeling you have about someone. It is something you do, repeatedly, in the small moments, in the laundry room, at the dinner table, in the middle of a storm that makes no sense. I try to be that for my students every day, especially the ones the system has already started to give up on, because I know what it meant to have one person who refused to. She was that person for me. Her grace, compassion, and hard work is embedded in everything that I am and everything I will become. Everything I am building traces back to her.

Growing up with ADHD and an executive function disorder, I watched firsthand how a lack of understanding from educators can quietly dismantle a child’s belief in themselves. I was not lazy. I was not incapable. But when the adults in my educational life repeatedly said they “didn’t understand” why I couldn’t do things, I began to absorb their confusion as my own failure. By the time I reached high school, I was carrying a 1.9 GPA and a quiet conviction that higher education simply wasn’t meant for someone like me. It took years of working in high-pressure, fast-paced restaurants before I found a goal that finally gave my strengths somewhere to go. I wanted to teach special education. More than that, I wanted to be the person in a student’s life who actually saw them, especially the ones nobody seemed to be looking for. That focus changed everything. I went back to school and graduated from the University of Lynchburg with a 3.95 GPA, one of the highest in the university, and the highest in the School of Education. The same person teachers had written off was now being recognized for academic excellence. That does not happen without someone eventually believing it is possible, and for a long time, I had to be that person for myself. That experience settled something in me that I now consider foundational to how I teach: a student’s emotional wellbeing and their academic success are deeply connected; you cannot separate them. Eleven years into teaching special education, I try to put that belief into practice every day. I have written and received three separate grants to bring resources into our building, including emotional regulation instruction, because students cannot learn when they are dysregulated. As an NJHS advisor, I have helped organize events like the Special Olympics “Little Feet Meet,” which builds the kind of inclusion and belonging that actually protects mental health in young people. Some of the most meaningful work happens in ways that are harder to put in a grant application. Noticing the student who seems off. Staying after the bell. Telling a kid, without a lot of fanfare, that I see them and I am not going anywhere. I was that student once. I remember what it felt like when most adults couldn’t be bothered to understand me, and I remember what it felt like the first time one did. As I work toward my Master’s degree and a role in educational leadership, I want to carry that same commitment into systems-level change, helping build school environments where students’ emotional and behavioral needs are met with restoration rather than removal. Mental health matters to me because I have lived inside what happens when it is ignored. I spent years recovering from it, and I have spent eleven more watching it happen to kids who deserve better. That is what keeps me in this work, and it is what I intend to spend the next chapter trying to change.