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.
