There are many outstanding educators who have earned recognition for their work with young people in our nation’s pubic schools. One of these is Andie Gudbegsson Redemann, a middle school Language Arts and English as a Second Language teacher and track coach in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She has been named the Pepsi Teacher of the Month in April, 2026. View the YouTube video below to learn more about Andie.
Physical education teacher and drill team coach Gussie Davis from Texas has been credited with creating a “living art form.” Photo credit: Kilgore College Rangerettes
Every once in awhile I come across the story of a pioneering teacher that I feel I simply must share. One of them is Gussie Nell Davis, a physical education teacher and drill team coach from Texas who is credited for creating a “living art form.”
Gussie was born in Farmersville, Texas, on Nov. 4 1906. As a child she was trained to be a concert pianist. However, after she began her education at the College of Industrial Arts, now known as Texas Woman’s University in Denton, Texas, she changed her major to physical education. Later she earned a Master’s degree from the University of Southern California.
Gussie inaugurated her career as an educator at Greenville High School in Greenville, Texas, in 1928. There she worked as a physical education teacher and pep squad direction. During her tenure there, she developed the first “dancing” pep squad in 1929.
Because of her success at Greenville, Gussie was hired to develop a similar program at Kilgore College in 1939. She developed a dancing drill team known as the Kilgore College Rangerettes, and established a performance genre that has served as a model for drill teams around the nation.
During Gussie’s 40 years as Director of the Rangerettes, her team traveled all over the country and internationally, representing Texas and the United States in South America, the Far East, Europe, and elsewhere around the world. The Rangerettes have been featured at numerous football bowl games across the nation, on national television, in movies, and on hundreds of magazine covers.
For this trailblazing work, Gussie earned many honors. She was named Honorary Citizen of Fort Worth in 1965. She received the International Citizen Citizenship Award in 1969, the Cotton Bowl Association 25th Anniversary Participation Award in 1974, a State of Texas House of Representatives Certificate of Citation, and a Distinguished Alumnae of Texas Woman’s University in 1978. She was also inducted into the Texas Women’s Hall of Fame. In 1996 she was named posthumously to the TDDTEA Texas Drill Team Hall of Fame, and in 1999, she was inducted into the Cotton Bowl Hall of Fame. Kilgore College named the Rangerette Residence on their campus in her honor.
Gussie Nell Davis retired in 1979. She passed away Dec. 20, 1993, from respiratory complications. She was interred in Farmersville Cemetery in Texas.
To learn more about this trailblazing educator and coach, click on this link to the Kilgore College Rangerettes.
Samantha Arsenault Livingstone earned an Olympic Gold Medal in 2000. She later went on to teach science and coach swimming in Gwinnett County, Georgia. Photo credit: Samantha Livingstone
Oftentimes exceptional athletes become educators and/or coaches in our nation’s pubic schools. This is certainly true of Samantha Arsenault Livingstone, an Olympic Gold Medal winner who went on to teach and coach in Georgia.
Samantha was born on Oct. 11, 1981, in Peabody, Massachusetts. Her prowess as a student athlete became evident even when she was a young child. When she graduated from Gardner High School in 1999, her coaches recognized her potential as an Olympic athlete. By then, she had won several individual state championship titles, and she was instrumental in helping her school garner two consecutive Massachusetts State team championships.
By the time she was 18, Samantha realized her potential when she qualified to compete in the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia. At these games she and her team members helped set a new Olympic record in the 4 x 200 meter freestyle, winning Gold Medals in the process.
After she returned home from the Olympics, Samantha enrolled at the University of Michigan, where she joined the swimming and diving team. In her sophomore year of college, she transferred to the University of Georgia, and she became a member of the swimming and diving team at that school, too.
Samantha earned both her Bachelor’s degree and her Master’s degree in Science Education from the University of Georgia. In addition, she is certified as a facilitator of Mindful Sports Performance Enhancement and is also trained in STARR (Stress + Trauma Activate, Release + Rewire) protocols.
After earning her degrees, Samantha accepted a position as a science teacher at Norcross High School in Gwinnett County, Georgia. She taught there for six years, from 2005 to 2011. She also coached swimming for two local organizations, Gwinnett County Summer programs and Swim Atlanta.
In 2016, Samantha founded Livingstone High Performance and the Whole athlete Initiative (WAI), an organization dedicated to building mental health support systems for individual athletes and athletic teams. Learn more about this by clicking on this link: WAI.
Over the course of her career as an athlete, Samantha has earned many accolades. She was named the NCAA Georgia Woman of the Year in 2005, and received the NCAA Top VIII Award the same year. She garnered the Joel Eves Award at the University of Georgia for obtaining the highest GPA for all the athletes in her graduating class, and was voted to the CoSIDA Academic All-America 1st Team. In 2018 she was inducted into the Greenfield, Massachussets’ Bay State Games Hall of Fame in recognition for her lifetime of sports achievements as a participant in their annual sporting event.
Former sixth grade science teacher Soichi Sakamoto from Maui, Hawaii, became a swim coach to Olympic swimmers. Photo credit: Outrigger Duke Kahanamoku Foundation
Many fine classroom teachers also earn acclaim as athletic coaches. One of these is Soichi Sakamoto, a science teacher who also became a swim coach to Olympian athletes.
Soichi was born on August 6, 1906. In the late 1930’s, he taught sixth grade science and health at Puunene School on the Hawaiian island of Maui. The school was built in 1922 on ten acres of land donated by the Hawaiian Commercial and Sugar Company.
At first, Soichi didn’t know anything about coaching a swim team, and his team members consisted of the children of poor sugar plantation workers. Nevertheless, the inventive teacher established the Three-Year Swim Cub in 1937. His goal was to guide his athletes to the Olympics within three years. The indefatigable coach was able to achieve his goal of creating a team that qualified for the US Olympic team; however, the 1940 Summer Games were cancelled because of the outbreak of World War II.
To get his student athletes to their goal, the innovative coach developed a training regimen involving the use of interval training. As a form of resistance training, Soichi used area irrigation ditches to train his athletes to swim against the current. In addition, he used pulleys and weights to build upper body strength in his young swimmers, also an innovation for the times.
Eventually, Soichi became the Swim Coach at the University of Hawaii, where he served from 1946 to 1961. He also served as an Assistant Coach for the US Olympic Swim Team from 1952 to 1956. Over the course of Soichi’s career, many of his athletes competed in the Olympics, where they earned gold, silver, and bronze medals.
For his work as a swim coach, Soichi earned international accolades. He was inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame, the Hawaii Sports Hall of Fame, and the American Swimming Coaches Association Hall of Fame. He is also a member of the Sports Circle of Honor at the University of Hawaii.
This superlative coach passed away on Sept. 29, 1997. He was 91 years old. To document the story of this Chalkboard Champion, a book detailing his life and career was written by Julia Checkoway. The biography, published in 2015, was entitled The Three-Year Swim Club: The Untold Story of Maui’s Sugar Ditch Kids and Their Quest for Olympic Glory. The volume is available on Amazon.com. You could also read this 2003 article published abut him in the Star Bulletin.
High school English teacher Stephanie King of Granger, Washington, has garnered a 2025 Horace Mann Award for Teaching Excellence. Photo credit: Yakima Herald-Republic
There are many excellent educators working in American public schools, and I am always excited when I get to write about one of them. Today, I am writing about Stephanie King, a high school English teacher from Washington. She has been named one of five recipients of a 2025 Horace Mann Award for Teaching Excellence by the National Education Association (NEA).
Stephanie has been a teacher at Granger High School in the Yakima Valley city of Granger for 16 years. She also serves her school district as a girls varsity and middle school soccer coach. Her student population is comprised of predominantly Hispanic, multilingual, and economically disadvantaged students.
This amazing education helped her students publish a book entitled We Are America Granger: Voice of the Nation’s Future, which explores the students’s experiences in their home town. The volume was published through the national We Are America Project. “Being able to have my students be able to write their stories about what the American experience is like for them, and to highlight what it’s like here in Granger for them as teenagers and seniors last year, it was phenomenal to have the published final book in hand,” declares Stephanie.
The Horace Mann Award for Teaching Excellence recognizes outstanding educators for demonstrating exemplary leadership in and out of the classroom, showing expertise in their instructional practices, advocating for students and the profession, demonstrating a commitment to equity and diversity, and engaging their communities and supporting other educators, according to the NEA Foundation website.
As a Horace Mann Award honoree, Stephanie will be featured in a mini-documentary which will be premiered at the NEA Foundation Salute to Excellence in Education Gala on Feb. 13, 2026, in Washington DC. In addition, she will receive a $10,000 cash prize. Although the cash prize is intended for her personal use, this Chalkboard Champion has indicated she plans to invest part of it back into her community to fund athletics programs.
