Teachers win Rowland Fellowship

Ms. Marcus and Ms. Celauro received a prestigious Rowland Foundation Fellowship. The grant of up to $150,000 will help make sure every student gets the help that they need.

Sarah Marcus is a Science teacher who has been teaching for 11 years and Sandy Celauro is a Reading Interventionist and former ELA teacher who has been in the education industry for 20 years. 

They originally came to the idea to apply for the Rowland Fellowship after seeing ways the school struggled and wanting to make students more comfortable when learning in a classroom. “We talk a lot about education,” Celauro said. 

The Rowland Foundation, which grants the fellowships, is an organization that focuses on giving grants to educators so that they can use the money to change something in their schools to make things work better.

Marcus and Celauro have one clear goal in mind: to implement an MTSS (Multi-Tiered System of Supports) in secondary classrooms. This would allow the school to better support students in the ways that they learn best.

“MTSS is a framework for making students have support. It’s a complex system that is hard to implement in small secondary schools,” Ms. Celauro explains.  

Marcus says they want “to make sure students have what they need to learn and to be supported…often we hear students say things about themselves that are not necessarily true like  ‘I am stupid, I am bad at math etc’...We are hoping that by making sure that every student has the support that they need, that we will not be hearing that as much.”

There is no average day when it comes to the Rowland Fellowship year. Their days are spent meeting with schools, researching the project, taking classes, as well as going to conferences.  

The grant is used for meetings, traveling, substitutes, classes, conferences, and anything that can help our school become stronger. In addition, they are spending a lot of time reading and researching different ways to support students. “As teachers, we don’t always have time to read documents for teachers,” Marcus said.

During meetings, they take in student perspectives and opinions, as they include not only educators in the meetings, but students as well.  “Our work is all about students. We want student voices heard. We aren’t students, so we want their voices heard like we had ours heard,” Marcus said. 

If they end up having leftover money when the year ends, it’ll all be given to the school so that the money is still thoroughly focused on positively changing the school. 

Although they are not sure of the ultimate outcome of their work, they plan to put together a series of recommendations that will give teachers what they need to best support students. 

Stay tuned for positive changes that this Rowland Fellowship will bring to our school.