Room 705

A Young Teacher, a Single Classroom, and an Innovative Collaboration

It’s the day before classes resume at Southwest High School after the winter break and Stephanie Balvaneda (’14) is stoked. After five-and-a-half years of degree requirements, certification courses, and student teaching, at last she has a classroom of her own.

First-year teacher Stephanie Balvaneda ('14) prepares her new classroom for the first day of school.

Just four days after signing a contract with the Sweetwater Union High School District (SUHSD), she is using a rainy in-service day to prepare her classroom. “I’m excited,” she admits to the visitor accompanying her across the puddle-riddled asphalt expanse between the main building and the mathematics quad.

“This is it,” she says, pausing to unlock the door of room 705 before crossing the threshold and flipping a switch to better illuminate the dim space inside, austere but for a couple of small, high windows, groupings of chair-desks, and colorful construction paper designs and posters with which she has adorned the walls. This is where she will teach five sections of Integrated Math One, a course for freshmen.

“I feel like it still hasn’t hit me,” she says when asked about the emotions she’s experiencing. “It’s a lot to take in right now.

“I feel like I have struggled and put in so much hard work and gone so many days and months and years of studying, working, staying up super late, and finally to be here and to just be able to enjoy everything that I have worked for, I still feel like it isn’t real.”

RETURN AND INSPIRE

But things are about to become more real for Balvaneda than for most teachers, even though she completed her student teaching requirement at Southwest High and already knows many of the students and educators. The first day of school, there will be extra attention focused on room 705.

Balvaneda completed her student teaching and now teaches math at Southwest High School in the Sweetwater Union High School District. 

People will be watching her and the media will share her story. That’s because the 25-year-old is the first hire from a new program called Return and Inspire to become a Sweetwater Educator (RISE), a collaboration between SUHSD and San Diego State’s College of Education.

RISE is designed to build on the university’s groundbreaking Compact for Success. Since 2000, the Compact has guaranteed admission to SDSU for Sweetwater students who meet certain benchmarks for college acceptance from middle school throughout their high school careers. RISE guarantees employment in the Sweetwater district for Compact students who want to teach math, science, special education and other subjects in which open teaching positions are often difficult to fill.

With more than 42,000 students in grades seven through 12, SUHSD is California’s largest secondary school district with 32 campuses spread across four South Bay cities including San Diego, Chula Vista, Imperial Beach and National City. The district has approximately 4,500 employees, some 1,800 of whom are teachers.

Although the district is rich in cultural and economic diversity, a large number of its residents are low-income. Approximately half of its students speak a language other than English at home and a relatively low percentage of them aspire to a college education.

RISING TO A CHALLENGE

Hiring teachers who reflect the makeup of Sweetwater’s students is difficult. RISE is intended to address that challenge by providing more teachers who mirror the district’s demographics.

Sweetwater Union High School District Superintendent Karen Janney ('10), Ed.D., collaborated with SDSU's College of Education to establish and implement the innovative RISE program.

“It's important for our (current) students to see our former students come back and become their own teachers,” says SUHSD Superintendent Karen Janney (’10), Ed.D. “It's powerful.”

Janney worked closely with the College of Education to implement RISE. She saw what the Compact for Success was able to accomplish. It has grown from its early years of motivating a few hundred students to work toward college admittance to the past several years in which thousands have been encouraged to participate. By working to gain admittance to SDSU, many became qualified to attend other institutions as well.

“The Compact has also inspired them to go to other colleges up and down the state and even to Ivy League colleges across the United States,” the superintendent points out. “Because of our relationship with San Diego State and the Compact, our college-going rates have increased exponentially in all areas of our district.”

STRUGGLES AND INSPIRATION

Janney helped establish and donates to a scholarship fund for Compact for Success students who want to teach. Balvaneda was among the first three RISE Scholars in the new program to receive a scholarship. She is, in fact, the embodiment of RISE.

Balvaneda decorates the walls of her new classroom before her first day as a teacher at Southwest High School.

Balvaneda’s background is similar to many of the students she will teach. Growing up in a single-parent, low-income household, she and her family moved from place to place struggling to make ends meet.

“I think a lot of the kids have similar difficulties,” she says. “Maybe in different ways, but they all have struggles that I think other communities don’t deal with.

“If my kids know that I came from the same place they did, I think it will inspire and push them and help them see that if you really put your mind to something, it is possible to do whatever it is that you want to do.”

LIGHTING A PATH

Like Balvaneda and her district’s superintendent, SDSU administrators are aware there’s more at stake in room 705 than freshmen learning to grasp math concepts. There is a role model lighting a path to lead students to professional careers.

“We are so excited, as a teacher preparation program, to be able to put high-quality, well prepared individuals back into the community where they started,” says Lisa McCully, Director of Student Services for the College of Education. She says last year’s original RISE cohort of three students that included Balvaneda has now grown to nearly a dozen.

A recent event for Compact for Success Scholars interested in teaching possibilities attracted almost 40. “These students are now seeing that teaching is a very viable profession going forward,” says McCully.

AN OPEN DOOR

If not for the Compact for Success and RISE, Balvaneda isn’t sure what she might be doing now. She is certain she would not be decorating a high school classroom in preparation of teaching math to high school freshmen.

Math teacher and SDSU RISE alumna Stephanie Balvaneda hopes to serve as a role model for students in the same school district where she grew up.

“I think I would be lost,” she speculates. “I think I would be working any job I could get that would support me.”

In high school she had entertained the notion of becoming a nurse. She thinks she might have had to join the military to make that possible.

“Overall, I wasn’t really college-bound mentally,” she recalls. “At that time I was more like, ‘I don’t think I’m going to go to college. I will have to work and help support my family.’”

The Compact for Success changed her thinking. “It presented an opportunity,” she says.

“When I was in high school I had a lot of teachers who were the reason why I was pushed to go to college; it’s not something that comes from the family. I know a lot of students are in the same situation where college isn’t something they see that they can reach.

“I am excited to tell them, ‘I’m here, I know where you guys are, but if you just try really hard there is opportunity and that door is open if you want to take it.’”

You can make a difference now for aspiring RISE teachers at SDSU with an on-line donation of any amount to the RISE Scholarship Fund through SDSU STRIVE.