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Polk Schools Name Teacher, Employee Of The Year

TBO.com

Published: February 12, 2009

A reading teacher and food service manager were honored Thursday night by the Polk County School District.

Ruth Teets, a reading teacher at Purcell Elementary in Mulberry, was named 2009 Teacher of the Year. Cindy Wickham, a food-service manager at Lakeland's Dixieland Elementary, was named this year's School-Related Employee of the Year.

Individual schools nominate workers for top honors. Teets and Wickham won a variety of cash awards and prizes, including a Chevrolet Malibu given to Teets by event sponsor, MidFlorida Federal Credit Union.

Both Teets and Wickham will compete for state Teacher Of The Year and state School-Related Employee Of The Year honors.

Teets has more than two decades of experience and is credited with improving the reading scores of the school's lowest-performing students by 22 percent in one year. She organized parents' workshops called "Donuts for Dad and Muffins for Mom'' that were designed to teach parents how to help their children with reading.

Wickham Cindy has a dozen years experience and has won statewide quality awards for her dining room on four different occasions. She designates one week each month in her dining room as "Lunch And A Book,'' encouraging students to read a book with lunch.

Also nominated were:

Teacher Of The Year:

Audrey Gelin, Boone Middle (Haines City)

Keli Keyes, Highland City Elementary

Barbara Langford, Alta Vista Elementary (Haines City)

Nicole Maassen, Bartow Middle

Wanda Miles, Garden Grove Elementary (Winter Haven)

Saralyn Smith, Kingsford Elementary (Mulberry)

Joan Turner, Westwood Middle (Winter Haven)

School-Related Employee Of The Year

JoAnn Cassidy, Daniel Jenkins Academy of Technology (Haines City)

Sherry Gary, Lake Alfred Elementary