LINDSEY TAVARES

I have had the great fortune of coming across lots of wonderful and inspiring educators and mentors in my life. My parents instilled a hard work ethic in me that has served me well. I have leaned into a lot of opportunities that have served me well. For example, this doctoral program, though very rigorous and challenging at times, exposed me to a whole other cohort of professionals that are across sector doing amazing work, not only in the education space, but in many sectors, and globally. So, I think all of those things really affect my success.

There is a great shortage of teachers right now, so you will have a job. But I think you need to look at workforce projections to understand that getting a teacher job as a social studies teacher is not the same as having an MLL certification. You need to be smart about what you're studying. It would be great if we could all just have a job and say, this is just what I love doing, and I'm just gonna have a job doing it, but that's not always realistic. So I think folks really need to be thinking very carefully about an intersection of what you like, what you're good at, and what is needed, what is going to pay your bills.

We are still feeling the effects of COVID. COVID has not really made its way through the educational system yet at all. Post-COVID, the kids were not the same, and so the schools are really dealing with a lot of issues, a lot of social-emotional issues, a lot of trauma that students are bringing into the school. And there's just a limit on resources. We could use twice the number of social workers, three times the number of social workers that we have, and young people are dealing with a lot right now. There's a lot of pressure on young people. We just don't have enough resources, not enough funds to do all the things that we need to support our youth. On the opportunities side, there has been a real resurgence in career and technical education over the past 10 years, and I think the conversation is shifting from that college-for-all mindset and mantra to we're really having to prepare students for college and career, or sometimes just career. Not everyone is going to go to college. I think that young people are being asked to make major life decisions at a very young age without all the information that they need to make smart decisions, and we are in an era where the landscape of work is rapidly changing. We are in a complete technological shift with the dawn of AI. So I feel great urgency when I look at my 18-year-old students that I'm graduating when they're being asked to make decisions about, do I go on to college, and if so, what am I studying, and am I going into debt, and will there be a job at the other end. I think that there are opportunities in the K-12 setting to do our absolute best, and we're still figuring out what that is exactly as the landscape shifts, but exposing kids to careers earlier, making sure that they have as much information, they have opportunity to explore, see what they like, see what they don't like. That should all be happening in the K-12 system.

I would say equity. Equity and access. I work for those values for kids that may not have always had that in their educational career previously. That really drives the work that I do every single day, trying to help to even the playing field, help to bring students up who have been down in the past, and try to make sure, especially in the high school setting, this is the last leg of the relay race in K-12 education, there's a great deal of urgency in making sure that we are getting our young people prepared to go out into the real world.