NAAC 2011 Scholarship Winner

Barbara Baganz

Barbara Baganz followed a different path to classroom teaching. She spent the majority of her professional life – 25 years – working for non-profits serving adults with disabilities. “While working at a junior college providing services to students with disabilities, I was exposed to the overwhelming spirit of the students … and their desire to obtain higher education,” she recounts. “The only thing that separated them from other college students was the need for some modifications and/or accommodations… so I decided that I would go back and get my teaching certification and take on this exciting challenge of preparing and empowering young people with disabilities starting at an early age.”

Baganz entered the Education Service Center Region XI Teacher Preparation Program, an alternative certification program based in a non-profit education service agency. The program offered intensive training in lesson planning and state requirements. It provided “phenomenal” training in classroom management, organization and preparation. Baganz praises the fact that the staff, instructors and specialists who observed her in the field offered constructive criticism and praise based on their own extensive teaching experience.

Baganz believes that the strength of nontraditional preparation programs is that they are designed to benefit both the teacher candidates as well as the schools and students they serve. She says “Alternative certification programs not only offer people interested in engaging our youth in education a viable route to obtaining their dream, but it offers the experience of its participants to the educational system. No amount of university classes could have given me the experience I received in my 25 years of working with adults with disabilities.” Rebecca Crist, Baganz’s mentor at Joy James elementary school and a veteran special education teacher, says “I have learned as much from her as she has from me. Mrs. Baganz has been a wealth of information for our entire department as she has had an entire career with individuals with disabilities before she ever stepped foot into our school.”