Science teacher Anika Graack is interviewed outside her classroom after being announced as New Educator of the Year (High School) at Sunrise High School Wednesday, May 4, 2022. The award is one of seven New Educator of the Year awards being announced in the district during Teacher Appreciation Week.
Thursday, May 5, 2022 | 2 a.m.
Sunrise Mountain High School science teacher Anika Graack wants her students to know that she cares for them.
She thinks that commitment to connections is what helped her be named as one of seven new educators of the year by the Clark County School District this week. The awards will be given out through Friday.
“I want my students to know that I love them, I support them,” and that she is excited to show them how science is part of their daily lives, she said Wednesday morning, minutes after learning about her honor.
District representatives surprised her with the news during her second-period class, where physical science students were working on their semester project, a model roller coaster made out of pool noodles. The district has been dropping by classrooms all week to let the teachers know that they are among the best, as nominated by administrators.
Graack, a first-year teacher, graduated from the University of Oregon in June 2021 with a degree in human physiology. She came to Las Vegas as part of Teach for America, which places teachers with a range of educational backgrounds in low-income schools for two years.
She hadn’t planned to become a teacher, even though both of her parents are educators — her mother is a school administrator, and her dad teaches high school history. She was thinking of a career in public health.
But the coronavirus pandemic steered her into the classroom because she said she saw educational inequities during distance learning and wanted to help students who took the harshest of those effects get back on track.
Graack said new teachers should come to Las Vegas with an open mind. At Sunrise Mountain, she said she’s found a good community, including among more-seasoned colleagues. She describes being gently persistent with getting to know her students – knowing that they are humans who have bad days like any adult, but forgiving them and making the next day better. By being consistent, she said, she earns their trust.
Graack teaches physical science — a combination of physics, chemistry and astronomy — and geoscience, or earth science.
She’s enrolled in UNLV’s master of education program. This summer, she’s doing a professional development course, also at UNLV, for geoscience teachers, in preparation for another year at Sunrise Mountain.
Sunrise Mountain is in the 89156 ZIP code, in the northeast valley where about a quarter of the children live below the poverty line. Only about 21% of its students were proficient in English language arts and less than 5% in math, according to the Nevada Department of Education’s most recent standardized test data. But Graack knows her students are smart and savvy.
Being at the base of Sunrise and Frenchman mountains, known internationally for their geological features, is a boon for earth science teachers. And as she wants her students to understand human effects on the Earth — like changing ocean acidity, carbon dioxide in the air, what litter does to the groundwater — the Hoover Dam and the Strip are also good field classrooms.
She said she asked her students what’s on the ground. Dirt, they said. The sidewalk. She elaborated, what’s on the ground on the Strip – an artery densely packed with buildings, cars, people and thus, pollution.
“They knew immediately what I was talking about,” she said.
