 For more than a decade, Horace Mann has sponsored the NEA Foundation Awards for Teaching Excellence because we know how important and deserving it is to shine a light on outstanding teachers who make a difference in their students' lives and who continue to elevate the role. So please join me in congratulating and honoring five individuals who have been singled out by their peers for going above and beyond and becoming this year's Horace Mann Award recipients. Any good teacher will have a significant investment in the community he or she teaches in. The school and community are intersected in such a way that you cannot be successful as a teacher if you don't have an appreciation for the community that they come from. I'm from one of the most rural counties in South Carolina. I'm from Sumter where a lot of the school community had a strong influence on my upbringing and my motivation to be a teacher as a child. I feel sometimes we move a little bit too fast and we need to take the time to get to know children and have that time allotted to learn about who they are as individuals and once I learn everything that I possibly can about my kids I can meet them wherever they're at because I know them. A great teacher is a teacher that finds those students that are struggling that are barely making it and willing to reach out grab that student and help pull them up to put them where they should be when they needed it and that's what Stephanie wanted to bring to the classroom and I know she's done that very well. Her students love her. She genuinely cares for children. She's an advocate for children and she stops at nothing to get what she feels they need. They're going to be nurtured and comforted but they're also going to be pushed to their maximum potential. And not only in the classroom, Stephanie has an ability to impact other teachers in the building so that they can reach further in their classrooms and with their students as well. She has just this uncanny way of connecting. She knows everyone and she brings a lot to HB Wayne. She continues to reach out to me personally recognizing that in order for her to really have the impact that she wants to have it's going to take all of us on the battlefield fighting for these kids. Stephanie's interaction has helped us to improve as a district. She brings a sense of we can do this we have to do this for the benefit of students and that's infectious. You can hear it in her response and see it in her body language the compassion that she has for being an educator. The road was not easy but I was determined that I was going to be successful. Nothing was going to stop me. If she has anything to do with it every child that crosses her door step will leave there with a passing grade and with the determination that they can go to higher education and that's what all teachers should do. Let your light shine that children will have someone that they can say wait I remember what Ms Johnson did and now I can do it. It could change the whole course of teaching if there were more teachers like Ms. Stephanie Johnson.