 Noelle Caldillaria is a high school special education teacher from El Paso, Texas and the president of the Texas State Teachers Association. He's a champion and advocate for all students across the state, but his passion runs deep for students with special needs. It started in middle school when he was asked to help coach eighth graders for the Special Olympics. I jumped on the opportunity of being able to work with a group of students that most would shy away from or would try to avoid, and I was part of a group of four other students who helped coach my fellow eighth graders and helped him prepare them for Special Olympics, and that's what started my journey in working with students with special needs and seeing how unique they were and how much they loved life and how much they were eager to learn and how really just by caring provide them a whole new way of living. What really put him on his trajectory as an advocate and union leader was a student he met while working as a teacher's aide and studying at night to get his credentials. He taught in the developmental skills class for students with intellectual disabilities. And we were just trying to teach them basic day-to-day skills and be as independent as possible, and I had one student who just seemed different than the rest. He was a lot more independent. His vocabulary was unlike any of the other students, for something just didn't seem right that he was placed in that classroom. And so we used to take our students out on community outings to try to teach them the independent skills of going to the store, putting together a list of groceries, being able to pay and get the correct change. The skills that a lot of us just take for granted that for them, it's a really life skill that we have to teach them. Being on that city bus, riding with our students, we're driving across McDonald's. And so immediately the student says, hey, mister, are we going to go to McDonald's for lunch? And I stopped and I looked and I said, well, how did you know that's McDonald's? He said, well, it says right there. And I said, yeah, but I thought you said you didn't know how to read. And so he stopped for a moment and he said, but I don't. And I said, you just read that sign. I said, we call that environmental print. I said, you know how to read. And he just kind of stood there and I just remember seeing that big smile. And he said, I can read? I said, yeah, I said, you just read. And he just stood there in amazement. And I said, now, how would you like to learn how to read other things? I said other things that are not just in pictures. And he said, oh, that'd be great. He goes, I'd love to do that. And it took me two years to take that student from being a non-reader to reading at a first grade level. I realized that this was not an appropriate placement for this student. And as I started asking the special education teacher, I started talking with the diagnostician on campus. I quickly came to realize that he had been misplaced because of the language barrier. I learned that he had come across from Mexico when he was in the fifth grade. And he was misdiagnosed and put in a class using an assessment tool that discriminated against language. We ended up realizing that that test was not the appropriate test to diagnose our students. And after a two-year period, we were able to retest the student, reassess them, and move them to the more independent class, the life skills class, which was a great success for him in being able to graduate and move on. And how did that discovery change what you decided to do in your career? The more I learned about that test, it began my advocacy journey because we were able to then working with the diagnostician and the special education teacher realize that in a community that is mostly bilingual, a lot of our students are coming to our schools, not knowing English. I was one of those students knowing and understanding that the reality that how many more students in our district have been misdiagnosed and misplaced because we're using an assessment that discriminates and has a bias against language built into it, really prompted a movement of eventually getting rid of that assessment. So I was really happy at how my discovery and my advocacy for my student ended up in district-wide and ultimately city-wide change because it had impacted all the neighboring districts to no longer use that assessment. And I believe it also had an impact nationwide because that assessment ended up getting phased out completely. And so it started to show me how important it was to have someone advocating for the students. And that's really what took me on this journey, to be an advocate primarily for students and my colleagues.