 Hello, my name is Josh Atherton. I'm the Executive Director of the Education Foundation for the St. Frame Valley. I hope this video finds you all well and healthy during this COVID-19 pandemic. It's a scary time for a lot of us and I am thinking about all of you and I hope that all of you are well. Unfortunately, due to the pandemic, we had to cancel our event coming up, Tribute to Teachers, which is an event that allows us to recognize all of our teachers who have been NAMI for Teacher of the Year. But next best part is that we have a video and we're gonna play that video of us doing a recognition here in a few minutes. But I wanna give you just a quick information about our Merchty Fund. Our foundation has set up. This Merchty Fund is for basic service for St. Frame students and their families along with St. Frame staff, whether it's part-time, full-time, paraprofessionals, teachers, any staff. And I wanna thank the district for being a great supporter of all of our employees, but we know that a lot of you have been impacted in many ways and we wanna be there for you. Also wanna give a congratulations and thank you to Xilinx Corp for stepping up and providing a $50,000 grant to our Merchty Fund. We also just found out yesterday that UC Health is providing a $5,000 grant for us as well. And we've had hundreds of donors so far that provide to that Merchty Fund and the irony of it is a lot of them are teachers and educators, which I just think just tells about our St. Frame family. So if you are needing assistance or help, you may call the Our Center directly or go to their website at ourcenter.org and you can go through their intake process and they are setting aside our funds specifically for St. Frame students, families and staff. So thank you and I hope you all are doing well. This video is to recognize our teachers and if you're watching this, you're here for maybe a teacher that you nominated or for a school that you're a part of and make sure to cheer loud and proud, whether it's in your basement or your living room and we hope as a foundation we can see you soon and we wish you all nothing but the best. Thank you. To share a message with our teachers and in particular, we have a number of teachers that have been recently selected. Education Foundation as a result of being nominated by your peers and by students and others as one of the selections for the Teacher of the Year are a number of you and I've really enjoyed following on Twitter all of the teachers who have been selected school by school and I've tried to respond to all of you letting you know how proud I am of you and the work that you've been doing. I've also been given names by Josh Atherton who leads the Education Foundation. Anyways, it's a source of real pride for me to see the great work that you're doing. I also want to thank you and all of our teachers and our staff and everyone in St. Brain for really the incredible way that you've been navigating this current health crisis that we are facing from the delivery of the curriculum to the connections that you're making on a daily basis with our students to the outreach. You guys have always made me extremely proud and I have felt extremely honored to be able to serve on your team and to see the work that you and we have been doing in terms of public education, not only for St. Brain but throughout the entire community and the impact that we make is significant and I hope you know that the teaching profession in my estimation is the most noble of all professions. Every single profession starts with someone needing to be taught. So whether you're in the medical field or an engineer or a lawyer or whatever it is that you end up pursuing, the beginning stage for you was always going to be a teacher as it was for me and my fondest memories in life come from the times that I've spent with my family as I'm sure that's the same with you and then also those wonderful teachers that I had a chance to meet along the way. So we had a number of close to 900 people that were nominated and so you have been selected out of a very large group and Stap Toyota and one of our great partners has been extremely gracious and supportive in sponsoring this Teacher of the Year and Tribute to Teachers. Now one of the things that I'm really disappointed in is that due to this health crisis we are not going to be able to host the Tribute to Teachers this spring but I have talked to the director, to the leader or executive director of the Ed Foundation, Mr. Josh Atherton and we're hoping to do some of the celebrations in the fall when we have our Gala, our Education Foundation Gala and we'll look for other ways to recognize you as well but I just want to tell you as sincerely as I can even though I'm not able to stand up on the stage and see you face to face as I've always had the opportunity to do so but I want you to know as sincerely as I can I am extremely grateful to all of you and I could not be more proud than to be able to be part of your team. All right, next up we're gonna quickly recognize some of our sponsors who I am just so grateful that we have these sponsors for Tribute to Teachers and honestly it makes my job so much easier when we're working on this event to have those sponsors and have their input and their financial resources to really make sure this event happens and we are grateful for our sponsors and so I want to give a shout out to a couple of our sponsors but specifically our presenting sponsor which is STAP Interstate Toyota. The STAP family have always been great partners and supporters of St. Virginia Valley Schools but also as our foundation the last couple of years and I want to say thank you to Brian, to Clint, to Debbie, to all the STAP family for supporting public education and supporting your community and supporting this event and really want to say thank you. Next up is Elevation's Credit Union. What can I say about Elevation's Credit Union? They are such a great credit union and they are so supportive of our teachers and our community. It doesn't matter what an unprofit is, they step up to the plate. Really want to thank Dennis and Michelle who are just incredible people and so they're at the diamond sponsor level and again thank you to Elevation for not only supporting this event but also our foundation as a whole. And our gold sponsors, just a lot of local great companies, we have Golden Triangle Construction, we have Longmont Pediatric Dentistry, we have the St. Varene Valley Education Association and we have specialty products. Again, thank you so much to our gold sponsors for really stepping up and helping us with this event. And then our silver sponsors are Adolfson and Peterson Construction Inc. We have High Plains Bank and we have the Saylo family. Again, thank you to our presenting, our diamond and our gold sponsors and our silver sponsors for just again helping us and also want to give a shout out to all those businesses who've stepped up to the plate for in kind donations, whether it's a free massage, whether it's a free coffee that we give out to our college teachers. Those are really important for what we do and everyone just really stepped up this year for helping us. So again, thank you to all of our sponsors who have helped this event be great. Thank you. All right, I wanted to introduce our St. Varene Valley Schools Education Foundation Teacher of the Year. And this is just such a cool part of my job. It's hard for me to explain because the fact that we get to recognize educators throughout St. Varene Valley Schools is such an incredible part of what we do. But then to be able to specifically recognize someone who is just the cream of the crop, who has just done everything that they can possibly do for their students and for us as a foundation and as a school district to recognize those efforts is awesome. So I want to introduce to all of you Jeanette Rivera-Gonzalez. Jeanette is a first grade teacher over at Northridge Elementary School. Lorenda Sampson is her principal and I have gotten to know about Jeanette so much since our committee made decision that she was gonna be her teacher of the year and Lorenda could not say enough good words and kind words about Jeanette and what she does for her students. I want to give you all some background on Jeanette if at all possible. Jeanette actually immigrated here from Mexico in middle school and went to Lions Middle Senior where Mark Mills, who's one of our assistant superintendents now was her principal, which I thought was really neat. And so she came here and she learned the English language and worked really hard. And after graduating from Lions, she became a paraprofessional and spent three or four years in our school district working and then she actually went to CU Boulder and got her teaching degree and then eventually got her master's degree too. And the other part about her too is Javier is her husband. Jamie is her fifth grader who happens to also go to Northridge as well. And when I called Lorenda and asked about Jeanette, Lorenda said one of the best things about Jeanette is that her family is so supportive. Her sister, her family members come to all their events and it's a big community, what they do. And that has really helped out the family concept of their school and also her classroom. I also have a couple of nominations here too. And I thought it'd be kind of neat if we read a couple of things from here just to show you what our committee. And I'm gonna try to be as quick as possible. I'm not gonna read everything, but this one person said that Jeanette invites mothers in for recognition on Mother's Day. She helps her family see how they can help their child at home even if English is not their first language or they don't know English at all. She has high expectations of all of her students in and out of school. She gets families connected to school by sending home monthly family projects that connects with what is being taught at school. By doing this, she's showing parents that they are an important part of the child's success at school. And she also uses her teaching skills to help those in the community by helping them obtain their GED. She has also shown her students that completing high school is very important and to continue on to college. She has her students involved in goal setting and always to reach those goals at school so they can be successful. Another nomination wrote that Jeanette is an exceptional teacher who not only sets high goals for herself, but also helps all students and parents set and attain those very high goals. Every single year, the students in Miss Rivera's class meet or exceed grade level standards regardless of barriers or obstacles. Every single year, Miss Rivera welcomes a student or two who is struggling significantly elsewhere and helps that student blossom. It is truly transformational to watch all students become self-directed, innovative, motivated and connected to one another to learning at our Northridge community because of her relentless love, care, intentionality and creativity. Our committee could not think of a better teacher of the year for our foundation, for our school district. Another quick point I wanted to make is that after spring break, when all this started happening with our society and people were going to self-isolation, Jeanette told us in the video you're about to see that the connection to her students was lost, that she was really sad that she couldn't see her students on everyday basis and her and her fifth grade daughter actually made up signs and notes and delivered them to each of her students' houses outside and put signs up in their yard to let them know that they feel loved by their teacher and that she was thinking of them. I just think that that's just what our educators, all of our educators are willing to do is to go above and beyond what's being called for them. So I'm happy to introduce Jeanette Rivera-Gonzalez as our 2020 teacher of the year for the Education Foundation and for St. Ferring Valley Schools. And want to introduce our Zoom video that we actually got to do with our superintendent, Dr. Don Haddad, Northridge Elementary Principal, Lorena Sampson and myself and of course, Jeanette. Jeanette did not know what the video was about or what the Zoom meeting was about. And so she's a little shocked, but it was fun doing this given the fact that we couldn't do it in person. This is probably the best way to do it through Zoom. So I hope you enjoy. Thank you. I would like to introduce you to a special guest that just came on. And I would like to introduce you to Dr. Don Haddad and I know you've met him a few times but he's got a few words to say right now, Jeanette, okay? Okay, thank you. Alrighty, Dr. Haddad, it's all yours. All right, how are you doing, Jeanette? Good. Thank you. Are you staying safe and well and all this stuff going on? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we've been really excited about everything that our teachers have been doing and the engagement of our students and things like that. So it's been such an impactful thing for kids. It's not only what we do for them today. It changes their lives in ways that we can't even predict. And especially when you have them at the elementary school level and then you think about how they're gonna grow up and come back, I've been able to see kids for 35 years come back and now a lot of them when I started, they're not too far behind me in terms of age and so you see just how important teaching is. But I've heard a lot of amazing things about you as a teacher. Following your career a little bit and some of your accomplishments and talking to Lorenda, some of the things that I'd like to hear a little bit about is just the way in which you connect with your students. I heard that you went to all of your students' homes and made cards for them and sit outside and let them know that you were still there for them. That's, I don't even know what to say about that because that just warms your heart and it just makes you realize what an incredible person and teacher you are. But tell me a little bit about that. That's pretty amazing. Yeah, well, that was before spring break. I remember it was, I was telling my daughter, she's also a fifth grade student at Northridge and I was telling how I was missing my students and I said, I want to make them think that I'm thinking about them. So what do we do? So with her and I, I said, why don't we make some notes for them and put them on their door and then if I make a sign and call the parents before to tell them I'm outside, tell them to come to the window at the door and I have a note for them. So even the parents were really excited, they were not expecting them and I just have a sign saying just to let them know that I was thinking about them and how much I was missing them and just to see like the, like their, sorry, their faces, you know, their smiling that really like I, when I came back home, I said my mission was completed by just seeing them, their faces and smiling through the note. So later the parents really appreciated that. And I, that's one of those things that these children will remember that for the rest of their life. I mean, that kind of outreach is just, it's just an incredible thing that you did. They will remember that forever and that's that, you know, that touch of safety and warmth and reassurance in a time where they're probably wondering a lot about what's going on, you know, first graders and figure all of this out and then they see, you know, a smiling friendly face and they think everything's gonna be okay. So thank you for that. You know, one of the things that I know about you too is that you have consistently exceeded all of the benchmarks for your students and their performance in terms of reading and English and bi-literacy and I just think that that's a combination of things. So on one hand, you're one of the most caring people and you could ever meet. And on the other hand, you still hold your students to high expectations and cause them to succeed. And that's really the amazing thing about teaching and what sets teachers apart is when you can love them and you can also expect a lot out of them. And you can do that at the same time. And that's what makes for a special teacher. You know, Larinda said something to me when I said, you know, kind of capture in a nutshell what you think of Jeanette and she said that you are truly a gift to education and a huge anchor at Northridge. And that no matter which child comes into your classroom, that you take that child and you make them a superstar. And so I wanted to congratulate you for being nominated for one of the teachers that will be considered for this. And the other thing that I wanna congratulate you for is after looking at all of those 900 candidates that were selected, you were selected as the top teacher of the year for the St. Brain Valley Schools. And so you are being recognized not only as someone who was nominated but you are the teacher of the year for the St. Brain Valley Schools. And it couldn't be more proud of you and grateful for what you've done for our children and for our community. You're a superstar. And thank you very much. And congratulations for that. Thank you. Congratulations. Yeah, thank you. I cannot think of a more deserving educator to be named St. Brain Teacher of the Year. I'm so proud of you. Yeah, thank you so much. And like I said, every year it's like my goal with families and like you said, our community is to be a role model. And even though I teach like first grade and we talk about what do they wanna be when they grow up and then I tell my story, like how I came to the US, you know, I English was my second language like them, some of them. And I said, if I do it, you can do it. And I see this year what's gonna be my first generation graduating from Monument High School. And I see those students come to me and see me as a model. And like I said, every year that's my goal, like for them to see me as a role model and so they can see if I do it, they can do it. You have been a role model and you've also been a leader at Northridge because Northridge, you know, as you know, was Colorado Succeeds School of the Year and Project of the Year. You guys are doing amazing things. So it's not just your first grade class. You've been a role model and a leader for the entire school and actually for the entire school district. So I really am grateful to you and very, very proud of you. Thank you. Yeah, Jeanette, we are all very proud of you. And the fact that you're a same brain alumni, I think it's just even better. I know Dawn's mission is always to grow our students locally if at all possible. And the fact that you came out of Lions Feeder and now that you're giving back to your community is pretty incredible. I'm a proud alumni as well, I went to Skyline and I spent a lot of time outside of Longmont but I wanted to come back and serve same brain. And I know what that's like and I really appreciate you serving, not only Northridge and your students but also the entire school district and when our committee looked through the nominations that were turned in for you, they were just blown away. Just, I mean, it's, you know, the cream rises to the top and when we had our final evaluation, it was just clear who was the top teacher of the year for the district. And so we're very proud of you. The Education Foundation is here for our teachers, for our students and to serve our school district. And it makes me so happy to be able to celebrate this with you. Obviously with the COVID-19, we can't have tribute to teachers. And I know Dawn, I know Lorenda and the rest of the district staff and our foundation are really sad that we can't do that but we wanna make sure that we could tell you in person as much as we possibly can through Zoom and be able to celebrate you but also it's not only just getting that recognition, we also wanted to also help you as well. And Dawn alluded earlier that STAP Toyota is one of our great business partners, not only for the foundation but also for the school district. And they give back day in and day out and they actually help sponsor tribute to teachers. And part of that sponsorship is to allow us to give prize money to all of our teachers for each of the schools but probably more importantly our district teacher of the year. And so on behalf of STAP Toyota and the Education Foundation, I would like to probably via mail, unfortunately, present you with a $4,000 check that you can use for whatever you want to use, go on a vacation when all this is done, do whatever you need to do but it's just a very small part of what we wanted to do to celebrate you for being the same brain value school's teacher of the year. That's exciting. Congratulations, Jeanette, I am so excited for you. I thought it was just a meeting about. Are you still shocked? We tricked you. Yeah, I was like harrying myself, like the points, how we involve families. I'm like maybe that's what they want to know. I told you yesterday, don't plan too much. We tricked you. Well, I can show you. Look. You have your time. Oh my gosh. Okay, so Jeanette, Shauna and I will find a time to create that video and we will still do it, okay? Okay. It was interesting because when I was, you asked me the question about parent engagement, I'm like, okay, let me write that down. Is that what I do? Oh, this is what I do. This is what I do. I do this, I do this, I do this. I'm gonna go on and on and I don't know if that's what they want, but yeah, it's anything for the kids. Like I'm teaching is my passion. So anything for them. And like you said, the Nordrish community has a heart, and like it's in my heart. So I, every day I do my best for them. I wanna congratulate all of our teachers that were nominated this year for Teacher of the Year, especially those who are finalists and for each school Teacher of the Year, our four finalists for the District Teacher of the Year, and of course, Jeanette Rivera-Gonzalez as our 2020 Teacher of the Year for the Education Foundation in St. Mary Valley Schools. This has been a very difficult time for many of us, but I wanna just recognize what our teachers are doing to help our students. I wanna thank you personally for everything that you're doing, teachers and educators and staff of St. Mary Valley Schools. And I just wanna wish you all health and safety as we go on and we really look forward to getting back to business and having normal business for our foundation. Lastly, I wanna introduce our foundation video that we premiered back in November at our gala. I wanna specifically thank Colin Rickman, who is a teacher in the school district for helping us put the video together. And our mission of student success, teacher excellence is always gonna be at the forefront for both our students and our teachers and making sure that we stick to that mission. And we thank our community of St. Frank for always being there for our foundation and for our school district. And I wish you all nothing but health and happiness. Thank you. We seek, we swim. Here's to the crazy ones. I have a dream. Search high and low, scour far and wide, comb through every inch of this magnificent state and you'll have a hard time finding a more fitting analogy for life than a race. The hours of meticulous preparation, the boldness to train, the determination to push past limits, the resolve to persevere, the focused goal to win, the steadfast courage to finish. But this seemingly solitary act of racing is not alone some journey. Because when you look, you find a simple truth. You never run alone. With every step you are upheld by a throng of champions. With every Korean you are picked up by a web of support. And all noise is drowned by the raucous ovation of the fanatics. But because they are hard. St. Vrain Valley schools are running a race. They are chasing hard after preeminence. They are hounding after student success and teacher excellence. And every day, they surpass even our loftiest expectations. Stride for stride, we run with the St. Vrain Valley schools. Mile after mile, we equip them on their trek. Year after year, we champion their cause. We are intensely honored to be partners in their journey. We are excessively proud to be amongst their legion of support. We are the education foundation for the St. Vrain Valley. And we run further together.