Susan Rosato named Vermont’s 2021 Teacher of the Year

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Susan Rosato, an English Language educator from Vermont, has been named her state’s 2021 Teacher of the Year. Photo credit: Linked In.

I enjoy sharing stories about exceptional educators who have earned accolades for their work in the classroom. One of these is Susan Rosato, an English Language educator from Vermont who has been named her state’s 2021 Teacher of the Year.

Susan currently teaches at Colchester High School in Colchester, Vermont, where she has been for 17 years. She began her career at the elementary level, teaching for five years at McMahon Elementary School in Holyoke, Massachusetts. In all, her career as an educator has spanned 22 years.

Within the educational community, Susan has a reputation for being a fierce advocate for immigrant and refugee families, and she has dedicated herself to smoothing their transition from their home countries to the United States. To this end, she has created and implemented a “newcomer” class in her school. She teaches the school’s English Learner (EL) course, and she instituted her school’s EL summer school program. In addition, she developed the district’s EL professional development course for her colleagues.

During the pandemic when students were completing lessons via distance learning, Susan stayed connected with families and provided support so they could maintain access to their children’s education, figure out how to sign up for unemployment benefits, and update their health information. She also created instructional and multilingual videos to provide information about the reopening of schools.

“What I can do and what we can all do to make students’ dreams a reality is we can start breaking down some of these barriers that refugee and immigrant students and other minority populations in our country and state face,” declares Susan. “I believe that our curriculum needs to be accessible and free of cultural bias. We need to start from the idea about what students can do, not what they can’t do,” she continues.

Susan earned her Bachelor’s degree in Secondary Education from the State University of New York at Cortland in 1991. She earned her Master’s degree in Teaching English as a Second Language from the State University of New York at Albany in 1994.

To read more about Susan Rosato, see this article about her published by the St. Albans Messenger.