Hi! My name is Kristina and I’m an ECE teacher at Colfax Elementary. I’ve been with DPS for 8 years. Our school is amazing! It is a small school with about 2 classes per grade level. We are a TNLI school so we teach classes in both English and Spanish. Our school serves a mostly low income population and we have a very diverse student body, both racially and developmentally. We also serve students from a homeless shelter on Colfax. The community in our school is very strong which is something that I really love about working there.
I have been wanting to attend a NAEYC conference, which stands for National Association for the Education of Young Children, for a long time. It is the world’s largest gathering of early childhood professionals. However, it’s never been in Denver since I’ve been teaching here, so I haven’t had the opportunity to go. Last year, it took place in Los Angeles which I knew was a short flight away, but I wasn’t sure how our ECE team would get there. We don’t make a lot of money as teachers, as I’m sure you know, so paying out of pocket for flights was out of the question. I learned about Educators Take Flight through an old coworker who had participated in the program in the past. I applied for my team as soon as I learned of the program. It was a very easy and smooth process. A month or so later, we learned we received the vouchers and we were thrilled! This dream of attending the NAEYC conference was now in reach.
Last November, we attended the 3-day NAEYC conference using the Educators Take Flight vouchers. My husband is always going to conferences and other great professional development experiences through his company, and I felt like I finally was able to have that enriching experience too. The conference was amazing and we learned so many different things from people all around the country. We took back literacy teaching strategies, social emotional development strategies, and ways to improve our teaching competency as a whole. We were also able to bond and grow stronger not only as individual teachers, but as a team.
We are truly grateful to United Airlines and the DPS Foundation for making this opportunity possible and we hope that many more educators will be able to make the most of this amazing opportunity! Thank you!
