“At UT, your professors care about you,” Lunsford says. Inspired by her own teachers, she switched her major to music education. After joining the Pride of the Southland Band, she immersed herself in the School of Music. Those first weeks, she felt like a tiny fish swimming in a giant ocean. She wanted a practical degree that might help provide for a family one day. “They made me believe I could do anything.”Īfter graduating from West Carroll High School, Lunsford arrived at UT as a pre-law major. “It didn’t matter that I was living in a tiny town, raised in a single-parent home, a girl, or whatever,” Lunsford says. As long as she was willing to put in the work, the world was hers, they told her. High school teachers noticed her talent and drive. Kami Lunsfordīorn and raised by a single mother in a churchgoing family in Trezevant, Tennessee, a town of less than a thousand people in rural Carroll County, Lunsford was giving 30-minute lessons for $5 to residents of all ages by the time she was in eighth grade.
Kami lausd professional#
In 14 years, she has grown KMS’s choir to reach thousands of students, launched shows and concerts that have become a community staple, and taught everyone from professional singers to students now working as educators across the state. It’s a staple of the approach Lunsford takes to both education and life. “We should be riding around on school buses, knocking on doors, and giving out checks.”
“Every teacher should get this award this year,” Lunsford told the Knox County School Board and Superintendent Bob Thomas at an October 7 ceremony honoring her achievement. She is the fourth UT education graduate to be named Teacher of the Year since 1990-the earliest year for which the Office of Professional Licensure in the College of Education, Health, and Human Sciences has records. Lunsford, who received a $3,000 check from the Tennessee Organization of School Superintendents as part of the award, is only the fourth music teacher since 1968 to win Tennessee’s highest award for teaching excellence. “If you’re a teacher watching, this isn’t special. “Thank you so much,” she said to the camera, tears welling in her eyes, her voice breaking with emotion. In an instant, Schwinn was through the door. Suddenly the video cut to Tennessee Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn in the hallway outside. A livestream from the Tennessee Department of Education played on a laptop computer as Lunsford and eight other finalists for the 2020–21 Tennessee Teacher of the Year award waited. A 2006 University of Tennessee, Knoxville, alumna, she sat beside her husband, surrounded by blue, white, and gold balloons in the library of Karns Middle School. The hour before the announcement felt like one of the longest in Kami Lunsford’s life.
0 kommentar(er)
