Congratulations to Rachele Hirsch-Brooks, a second-grade teacher at Creekside Elementary School, who has been selected as the City-Wide Reading Teacher of the Year by the Suffolk Reading Council. She will now be considered for the Virginia State Reading Association’s Reading Teacher of the Year, which awards $1,000 to the winner. Hirsch-Brooks served as the local council’s president for the past two years, coordinating the city-wide Young Authors student writing competition and organizing two successful book drives that donated more than 2,000 books to area children’s shelters. She earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Old Dominion University.
In her application, Hirsch-Brooks explained how she struggled with reading as a child, but worked hard to overcome her early stumbles. “Within my classroom, students know and understand that literacy is their lifeline,” she said, but she knows that teaching reading “is not a one-size-fits-all approach.” She works to bring enthusiasm to reading by inviting guests in as mystery readers, and by setting a role model of lifelong reading during the daily “Drop Everything and Read” time. When her students “graduate” to third grade, she said her “wish is that they always want to open a book and go on an amazing adventure to a faraway land, and just escape reality for a bit to be entertained by a soul-capturing story.”
