Each fall, parents, staff, and students submit names and responses to who they believe should be honored with teacher of the year.

Gwen Hansen-Vigil, Principal of Eaglecrest, helps behind the process of teacher of the year with several others.

“Everybody can recommend. We promote Teacher of the Year every fall. We ask ourselves if the nominee is being supported by more than one of the groups. It’s not always the number of responses. We try to take the voice of all of our surrounding communities,”  Hansen-Vigil said.

Hansen-Vigil is a heavy supporter in including everyone in this process. She believes that parents, teachers, and students should be able to all participate in who should be honored with this award.

As aforementioned, votes are not always the deciding factor in the final selection. Sometimes, the committee who chooses teacher of the year looks at who supports them. If a specific teacher only receives responses from students and none from the surrounding communities, they might not be seen as highly as a teacher who receives a lower number of responses but increased support from more than a single community.

Of course, there are some set requirements that Eaglecrest’s teacher of the year has to conform to.

“The teacher of the year we participate in is mirrored to the district process. There are some set conditions that we do follow. One of them is you have to be a teacher at that school for 5 years,” Hansen-Vigil said.

Teacher of the year is looked highly upon by many district officials. The process that the district created has been the outline for many schools. Being a teacher at that school for 5 years is one of a few requirements. Another requirement is that after a teacher has received the award once, they cannot receive it again within the same district.

When the eligible teacher list is sent out to the community in the fall, the ineligible teachers are already removed so there is no misunderstandings.

This may sound like eventually the pool of eligible teachers would become limited. According to Hansen-Vigil, this is not the case.

“Since we are such a large school, we always have new teachers eligible every year,” Hansen-Vigil said.

The number of teachers rarely spikes or falls drastically. Whenever one teacher receives the award, another teacher seems to become eligible.

Teacher of the year is just one way to look highly upon the staff and faculty. This is not considered a contest or a competition, it’s a celebration.

“Teaching is a calling,” Hansen-Vigil said. “It’s rewarding, but it is truly very demanding. But overall, the reward is so much more. Teacher of the Year is just one way to honor a kind of effort that is looked highly upon.”