Transcripts

text | pdf |

---

SPEAKER: An alternative high school teacher is this year's teacher of the year. The Education Minnesota Teachers Union selected Kelly Holstein, an English teacher at Tokata Learning Center in Shakopee for this year's top honor. Holstein has been teaching it Takata since 2012, and she joins me now. Congratulations on being named teacher of the year.

KELLY HOLSTEIN: Thank you so much.

SPEAKER: So I want to talk about your students to start. I understand for many of them, traditional high school just wasn't working for them for whatever reason. So here they are in an alternative learning situation. So, what do you have to do? Or what pressure is on you to make sure this experience does work for them?

KELLY HOLSTEIN: I think it's really important to meet students where they're at, and then gently nudge them to keep growing forward to make sure that, I mean, every student matters. So to make sure that they're seen, that they're heard, that we value them as whole individuals. And then we're also aware of the things and the blocks that have gotten away in the past for them and do everything we can to diminish or get rid of those so that they are able to get into their learning brains and get into the academic part.

SPEAKER: What sorts of things are getting in the way for them when they arrive?

KELLY HOLSTEIN: Oh, it can be a lot of things. It can be chemical dependency. It can be mental health issues. It can be anxiety, depression.

It can be problems with home, maybe some parents are dealing with some chemical dependency, homelessness, being victims of racism, or, I mean, there's just such a variety of things, adverse childhood experiences. Some of them have a really high score on that, which means that they've experienced some things that have been very traumatic to them. And so trust might be an issue. And just trying to process that pain.

SPEAKER: So you've taught in more traditional settings and more recently, now you're here at Takata. So, what was the difference for you in the way you work? Were there challenges to making the transition?

KELLY HOLSTEIN: There were some challenges. And I had the opportunity to help co-design and co-open the school, which has been an opportunity of a lifetime. And I got to create a curriculum for 9 through 12 English.

And so we sat down one day and said, what kind of policies do we want? What do we want our vibe to be? What's our mission statement? And then beyond that, I worked in social work before I became a teacher.

So I've worked with at risk youth for close to 25 years. And so I have worked with youth in any kind of situation that you can imagine. And so it doesn't scare me, like, whatever they're going through. And so that part wasn't a transition. But, I think, working with students who did not usually had not positive relationships with teachers and learning how to earn that respect and learning how to earn that trust, I was able to apply some of my social work skills to that but in an academic setting.

SPEAKER: What does being teacher of the year here in Minnesota do for you or your work?

KELLY HOLSTEIN: I am really excited to be able to change the narrative about ALC students, about alternative high school students, and to have that opportunity for people to realize how wonderful these humans are and to just change the narrative.

SPEAKER: Tell us what the narrative was or might still be and what you'd like to change it to?

KELLY HOLSTEIN: Sometimes there is a negative view of students who are at ALCs. For some of these students, they feel that they will not get a high school diploma. And so it has the very unflattering nickname ALC [INAUDIBLE] [BLEEP] last chance.

I've had many students tell me, I didn't think I'd ever graduate. We have a lot of students that are first-generation graduates and their family. As a social worker, one of my jobs was to be a case manager with kids who had dropped out of high school.

And it's tough to not have a high school diploma. And my hope is that I can reach every single kid and give them a chance to get that high school diploma. I just want them to have more choices and more opportunities.

SPEAKER: I could imagine this experience of being in an alternative high school could lead to a sense of otherness or even enhance that if students already feel that way. So, what's the role ALCs play in taking students out of the mainstream? And could that actually lead to more of a sense of isolation?

KELLY HOLSTEIN: It's a fair question. We feel like a family. And students say that when they arrive at our school, in a lot of ways, they feel home. They feel like they're around other people that don't judge them.

And we don't have cliques in our school. We don't-- I mean, everyone just takes care of everyone else because they know what it feels like if you don't have that support from other students. So they're helping each other with academics.

They're helping each other with social issues. They are supporting them and standing up for them. And so I think that experience of getting to feel like you're in this family and having love and belonging is really powerful.

SPEAKER: Kelly Holstein, 2018 Teacher of the Year here in Minnesota, congratulations. And thanks for coming in.

KELLY HOLSTEIN: Thank you so much for having me.