Education is a career that won’t go away. The future of education lies within the new generation, making it so important to pass on the gift of teaching.
The club Educators Rising allows students the opportunity to dive into the education career path and experience firsthand some of the key aspects that go into becoming a teacher.
“It’s compared to FBLA or Skills USA. It’s a CTE club, which is like career and technical education, and it’s a way to grow teachers in the state of Nebraska and nationally. So it’s a national organization,” said librarian Kari Bulgrin. Bulgrin is the Ed Rising club sponsor.
The club is a relatively new concept that has arisen and grown with the increasing interest in education and the process of becoming a teacher.
“A lot of schools have classes in their high school that are college classes that help students not need to take as many in college,” said Bulgrin said. “We have the Intro to Education class. Because we have that class, we aren’t allowed to have Educators Rising. If we didn’t have that class, we couldn’t have that club.”
Teachers can have a huge impact on their students and inspire them to go down certain career paths and pursue certain interests.
“I think that more people want to be teachers, especially elementary teachers,” Bulgrin said. “I think teachers themselves are taking more time to build relationships with students, so then students see, ‘Oh, this is something I’d really like. I would like to get to know my students. I would like to get to know how this all works,’” Bulgrin said.
The club has seen a lot of growth since it began in 2020, and opened up new possibilities for the club to travel and compete.
“I think it’s grown a lot since the girls that are seniors this year really take pride in what they want to be, and so I think us setting the club up to be like this, it’s more known this year because we have spoken up and tried to branch out because all of us want to make a difference.” said senior Amelia Robledo.
In many ways, the club has evolved and improved throughout the years, and has begun to show more involvement.
“I would definitely say the involvement has changed, and now we actually do activities for the whole school and not just ‘let’s get out of school and go do this,”’ said Robledo said. “I know when I got into the program last year, it was just like come to this thing at Wayne (State) but this year you, like, signed up to be online, so you’re officially in the Educators Rising Corporation.”
Bulgrin and Bill Heard, the Intro to Education teacher, work together to cater to the students and what exactly they want to pursue.
“I also do a lot of college visit stuff, so the Ed Rising Organization of Nebraska does an expo every fall at UNO,” Bulgrin said. “So I try to see where the students want to go and help them understand. There was a Midland day and a Doane day, so some smaller schools too.”
Alongside visits, they work to help the community and improve it for those around.
“We do like community service things, like we clean up parks, like school parks,” said Robledo said. “And then we obviously brought the puppies in for finals week, and we’ll do that again for like the second round of finals.”
The club is constantly looking for new students to join the club and help the organization grow and improve in the upcoming years.
“I just really want to continue to grow it, so we really need ninth, 10th and 11th graders to see the club and understand what it is. We’re not doing lesson plans every week. We’re trying to do service projects, we’re trying to see what our teachers are really doing and get to know them,” Bulgrin said. “So I’d like to grow the underclassman so it continues.”
