The teachers who shaped the Class of 2025

Quick, think about a teacher who made an impact on you.

Good teachers matter. Just ask Quinta Brunson, who named her show Abbott Elementary after her middle school teacher. Research shows that when students have high-quality teachers, they do better in school. They want to be at school. And sometimes, they get interested in becoming a teacher themselves.

The 27 students in OPB’s Class of 2025 have had dozens of teachers over their 12 years of public school. As the end of senior year approaches, OPB asked each student to name a couple of teachers who made an impact on them — and many of them did.

The teachers these students named come from elementary, middle and high school. They teach a broad range of subjects. They’re young and old. Some come from families of teachers, others fell into the job by accident. Some are no longer in the classroom.

Here are those teacher’s stories, as well as the stories of why they were so important to the Class of 2025.

The elementary school teachers

Back in 2012, Class of 2025 student Kaylie was in Vickie Saula’s kindergarten class. Twelve years later, she said one day that year made for one of her favorite school memories.

Kaylie and her classmates were close, and would miss each other over spring break. So Saula arranged a day for everyone to meet up at a McDonalds PlayPlace.

“She saw how close everybody was in our class and how we were all really good friends,” Kaylie recalled.

“Over half the class showed up. You could tell that everybody really wanted to be there.”

Connection is the name of Saula’s game. Building those relationships keeps students coming back to school, she said.

And those connections don’t end when a student moves on to the next grade. Saula is technically retired but teaches first grade full-time at Earl Boyles Elementary School. This year, she has a 3rd-grade student who comes to her classroom as a “helper” every time his class has a sub.

“He said, ‘I really like when we have substitutes because I get to see you again,’” she said.

She meets weekly with a now-5th grader she’s known since kindergarten.

And the connections can last even longer. Saula went to Class of 2025 student Logan’s graduation party last spring after he graduated early.

“Relationship-building, that’s how you get the most out of a student, and so that’s what I concentrate on,” she said. “Once you’ve built that relationship, they want to come back.”

Down the hall from Saula’s room is Linda Long, who’s taught at Earl Boyles since the school first opened in 2002.

“I find [teaching] rewarding,” Long said. She taught third grade when the Class of 2025 was at Earl Boyles. Now she teaches fourth.

“It can be stressful, but I’m constantly learning, every year I’m learning new things, so I think it’s … definitely rewarding when you see the kids progress.”

A couple of teachers have left the elementary school classroom.

Mari Schay taught the Class of 2025 music. Now she teaches future teachers at Portland State University.

“Teaching is a service industry,” Schay wrote in an email responding to OPB’s questions.

“A quality teacher serves their community and each of their students by inspiring and motivating them to follow their own curiosity. At the same time, they offer a varied and rigorous curriculum, so every student can find an access point and a way to thrive.”

Schay said she felt she could make a bigger difference working with future teachers.

“Almost every one of the 100 students in our music education program was inspired by a teacher,” Schay said. “Someone lit a spark in them, and they want to keep the flame burning for their future students.”

Jen Mazalook didn’t want to leave the classroom, but health challenges forced her to.

“I still struggle with the fact that there’s kids, they’re my kids that I worked with that I’m not there to help,” Mazalook said.

She worked as a learning specialist at Earl Boyles, helping identify students who need extra help and working on specific skills with them.

“You can see it in their eyes when they start to believe they can learn,” Mazalook said.

Class of 2025 student Osvaldo, who named Mazalook as one of his impactful teachers, was one of the first students she worked with, when he was in third grade and struggling with reading.

“A lot of what I did … was building up his self-confidence to realize, no, he has amazing comprehension skills,” Mazalook recalled. “He has all of these things that work for him, but his brain has to work a lot harder to get there.”

“I always joked with Osvaldo; I said that because he can talk, he’s so brilliant, and I always told him that he was going to be president one day and I better get an invitation to the inauguration,” she said.

The specials teachers

The David Douglas School District music program stands out for the opportunities it provides students and the variety of options available.

Those opportunities really ramp up in middle school, where students can play an instrument in band or sing out the high notes in choir.

Kate Dogra was the choir director at Ron Russell Middle School, teaching several Class of 2025 students. She calls education a “silver bullet”.

“If you have a well-educated populace, you will have a happy healthy society,” Dogra said. “It was my form of taking action and being part of social justice.”

Dogra now lives out of state, on a “career pause” as she takes care of her two kids at home.

She said quality teachers think of students as humans first.

“They’re people and they have different struggles and different needs and need to be prioritized as people first,” she said.

As students moved on to David Douglas High School, some of them took theater classes with Michael Givler.

Givler remembers struggling as an elementary student and learning he was dyslexic. By high school, he started directing students in plays and loved it.

“As you’re directing or as you’re teaching, you know if it’s going well or not,” Givler said. “If you do a bomber lesson, you can tell it’s not happening.”

Givler said good teaching is about building trust with students and being there for them.

“Good teachers really pay attention to their kids, so almost all the time I can tell — am I making a breakthrough? Because you can see it in the way they behave in class, the way they engage with the material.”

Maria Galati teaches art at David Douglas High School.

“Our students need our connection, our warmth, our care, our support, and that feels so good,” she said. “That feeling needed and feeling like I can make a difference in someone’s life, even if it’s small, is super satisfying.”

Class of 2025 student Anna first took Galati’s art classes sophomore year. She learned about fonts in calligraphy, showed her art in student shows, and has gotten into sewing because of Galati.

“Her creativity, her positivity encourages me to keep doing art, keep pursuing what I want to do,” Anna said. “Even though now I don’t do art as much as I used to, I still appreciate her for being someone I can talk to about it.”

Alana Harris works in special education at David Douglas High School, helping students one-on-one to get them to graduation. But for her, the most important things she can help students learn are how to navigate the world and “how to be a whole person who can appreciate that everyone else in the room is still figuring it out and hopefully working on themselves to improve too.”

The core subjects

To earn the 24 credits required to graduate from high school in Oregon, students have to take several years of English, social studies, science, and math.

The ninth graders in Heidi Willis’ math class are usually students who have struggled with the subject in the past. But that doesn’t mean she takes it easy on them.

“I’m kind of a mean mom,” Willis explained.

“Freshmen, 14-year-olds, a lot of them don’t want to have to work harder than they need to, and so a lot of kids won’t work unless you kind of push them… they all know I love them, but I’m not going to let them get away with anything.”

Willis went to David Douglas High School, where she had a math teacher who made her feel good at math for the first time. She wanted to pass that on to students too.

“It’s a phenomenal feeling when somebody unwraps it for you and shows you that it makes sense,” Willis said.

Class of 2025 students also appreciate when teachers are there for them during tough times, like Anais, who still visits Ms. Willis and other teachers from freshman and sophomore years when she needs someone to talk to.

As a sophomore, Class of 2025 student Anna took advanced biology with Scott Dossa. One day, she remembered coming to class upset after struggling on a test in another class.

“I knew I did really bad, and for some reason, that kind of just made me want to cry and so I kind of just broke down in his class,” Anna recalled.

After class, she apologized to Dossa for crying in his class. Two years later, she still remembers what he said.

“‘It’s okay that sometimes you feel like you’re going to fail, because it’s a good thing that you make mistakes,’” she recalled him saying.

“The fact that I’m making mistakes was what makes me human, and that kind of comforted me a lot.”

Dossa said he often tries to reassure advanced students like he did for Anna that day.

“Just to say your grade doesn’t really measure you all the time, it’s just a score in a particular class, but it doesn’t tell your potential, it doesn’t tell what happened to you outside of the room that maybe influenced your scores,” Dossa said. “I think that’s an important message for kids.”

“You don’t have to love every moment of teaching, but you have to believe in the potential of students,” said English teacher Chris Mathews.

Class of 2025 student Ali picked Mathews as one of her most influential teachers, after having him in a Black Studies class this school year. But they’ve known each other since her freshman year through a weekly class called Advisory, which pairs a class with the same teacher for all of high school in an effort to give students an adult they can talk to at school.

“You have to let them know that — they have to know, whether it’s tough love or straight up kindness, they really need to know that you care about their development as a person, as a student,” Mathews said.

The key factor in quality teaching for English teacher Michael Theofelis is being authentic.

“I think it’s really important for the kids to understand who you are as a person, to an extent, and your personality should come out in what you teach,” he said.

Class of 2025 student Austin, who now attends Adrienne C. Nelson High School, chose Theofelis and Dossa as two of his favorite teachers despite changing schools in 11th grade.

“They’ve been a really big impact for me both educationally and mentally,” he shared.

Theofelis’ flavor of authenticity is humor and using his own experience as a student to connect with the sophomores and juniors he teaches at David Douglas.

“We still teach some stuff that I read when I was a sophomore in high school,” he said, like To Kill a Mockingbird and Fahrenheit 451. “Letting them know — when I was a sophomore in high school, my desire to read this was much lower than it is today … I think they appreciate some of that honesty.”

Social studies teacher and wrestling coach Scott Johnson also likes to share his life with his students. He’s been to 42 countries and hopes that encourages students to travel, too.

“You want to teach them some skills and make a positive impact in their lives,” Johnson said.

“They’ll like you if you’re nice, but they won’t really respect you unless you taught them something.”

Barlow High School science teacher Steven Andreen started out in education as a coach. But he wanted to connect with more students.

“As I got more into coaching I realized that my impact wasn’t the football that I taught my players, but in the lessons that they learned through the game,” Andreen wrote in an email response to OPB.

Andreen taught several Class of 2025 students as a science and history teacher at David Douglas High School.

It was in history class that Class of 2025 student Austin connected with Andreen and Nathan Tew, another teacher.

“I remember really liking their teaching styles and how interactive they were with the students,” Austin shared.

“I believe they are a big reason as to why I am so interested in other cultures around the world and how different they are from the US.”

The boomerangs

There are a couple of teachers who have crossed paths with the Class of 2025 more than once

Jen DeFrances taught the Class of 2025 in second, fourth and fifth grades.

Class of 2025 student Josh remembers DeFrances sending him off to middle school. “She was just there for me, and she made it easier to go into middle school with a work mindset,” he said.

“Going into middle school, I was ready because of her.”

In 2020, DeFrances moved over to David Douglas High School to be a librarian, her original education goal after a first career as a chemist. She has enjoyed checking in with students as they walk into the library a little taller, a little more mature, and with interests she can talk to them about.

“It’s just sweet to see them getting ready to go to college and on their way after seeing them having a hard time when their pencil broke,” DeFrances said.

Like DeFrances, Nathan Tew has been able to teach the Class of 2025 through multiple grades. He first met them as a social studies teacher at Ron Russell Middle School.

Later, he moved to David Douglas High School, his alma mater, to teach physical education and coach. He saw firsthand the Class of 2025’s tumultuous educational experience, including going to middle school through a pandemic. Tew sees himself as providing some consistency in his student’s lives.

“I’ve known some of them for six years,” Tew said.

“To watch them be awkward middle schoolers to getting jobs, and doing sports and activities has been kind of cool to see.”