Her Story
About Nicole
My journey in education began unexpectedly after I graduated from Texas A&M University with a degree in exercise physiology. I worked in cardiac rehab for about a year, but when I moved back to College Station and couldn't find a position in that field, I applied for a teaching job and got it. That summer I went back and got my teaching certificate, and I became a full-time teacher after that, staying in education and teaching elementary for almost all of those years as both a PE teacher and a kindergarten teacher. Since 2020, I've been at DETCA, which was established to serve 6 school districts in our very rural Deep East Texas area. We share career and technical education pathways where students can earn post-secondary credentials from colleges, focusing on kids who don't have plans to go off to a 4-year school. We only choose programs that are on the high-wage, high-demand list with our workforce, so kids can get credentialed and stay here locally to get better paying jobs without having to travel an hour to the nearest college. What started as helping about 100 high school kids take dual credit courses has grown to over 600 students, and we've become a regional workforce training center with 5 different colleges working out of our building, offering everything from CDL truck driving to registered nursing to firefighter certification. We went from an almost empty building to running out of room, and now we're looking for grants to expand so we can continue giving our community opportunities to reskill, upskill, or start careers they never thought possible in our rural area.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Nicole
01What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
What's most important to me is the belief that our kids shouldn't be penalized for the zip code that they're raised in. One of our economic directors who was over the economic development corporation here always used to say that, and we took that to heart. I think we're really starting to show that we are changing the narrative and changing what that looks like here, because we're bringing so many opportunities back to our town. Because I grew up here, this work is personal for me. The kids I'm now helping are the kids I taught when they were in elementary school, and I went to school with their parents and grandparents, so it makes it so much more special. I really think what we have going on here is something that rural areas should look into, because we really can tell a difference in our town and how much it has helped. Just the other night at the baseball park, a guy walked up to me and gave me a big hug and told me that I had changed his life because we had helped pay for him to go to truck driving school, and he now has a great job. He said it completely changed the shift of his life and the direction he was going, and I think that can be mimicked in a lot of small towns where people don't think they have opportunities.
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