Ross finds her passion as teacher
Published 7:47 pm Tuesday, February 6, 2018
Part of an ongoing series featuring the teachers nominated for Vicksburg-Warren County Chamber of Commerce’s Teacher of the Year honors.
April Ross was out to break the tradition and blaze her own path.
Her mom was a teacher as were two of her aunts, but not her. She was going to go into business. Then during a break from college she took a job as a substitute teacher and her entire plan changed.
“There is so much to like about it,” Ross said. ”If you don’t want to go to work one day, just say you’re not feeling good and you decide to get up and go, those children make my day. That is just my passion. I love those students and I love to see them learn. The children make my day.”
Ross has now been teaching for 21 years and currently works as a pre-K teacher at Dana Road Elementary after spending the first 19 years of her career teaching kindergarten and first grade.
“The transition going from kindergarten to pre-K was very rewarding, but kind of challenging at first,” Ross said. “I didn’t think I could teach those small babies. Now with seeing them learn, pre-K absorbs a lot of knowledge so I just teach and they learn. I see learning taking place.”
Ross graduated from Alcorn State with a Bachelors in Elementary Education in 1998 and with a Masters in Education in 2015. She is Dana Road’s nominee for the Vicksburg-Warren County Chamber of Commerce’s Elementary Teacher of the Year. This is the third time she has been chosen as her school’s teacher of the year in the 10 years she has been at Dana Road.
“It means so much to me, but there’s so many other teachers,” Ross said. “I was so shocked about it, I really couldn’t get myself together. It is not about me. Everything at our school is about those children. We have very good teachers at Dana Road.”
Working in pre-K, Ross said a lot of the focus is working on play skills, but she is working to teach her students reading and language. The students work at stations and also in the class as a group. Ross said the lessons are tailored to give the students freedom to choose what they want or like to work on.
“They learn what everybody else learns,” Ross said. “So we do reading. We do language. We do learning stations and in the learning stations we try to give them differentiated instruction where they are able to pick things they want to do with their partners or pick things they like to do.”
He goal everyday is to have happy students at the end of the day. A day in pre-K is rife with challenges from students crying to having bathroom accidents or just generally being unhappy, but Ross works to keep them on task and end the day with everyone in a good mood.
“A successful day is I am keeping the main thing the main thing,” Ross said. “I start the day thinking everything is about my children. Everything is about them when I come to work. If I keep that in mind, then they will be happy.”
The Vicksburg-Warren County Chamber of Commerce will choose one elementary and one secondary teacher of the year at the chamber luncheon Feb. 21. The winner of each award will receive $1,000 from Ameristar Casino and the runner-up for each award will receive $500 from Mutual Credit Union.
“I feel like I am educator of the year anyway,” Ross said. “The smiles on my children’s faces, my parents being happy, I am educator of the year.”