Meet 4 of the outstanding teachers who won Heart of Education awards

Joel Bradley has spent much of the COVID-19 pandemic visiting the homes of students at Mack Middle School in east Las Vegas to ensure that their basic needs are being met.

During distance learning and even after the school reopened for in-person instruction on March 22, many students with chronic absenteeism were “struggling,” said Bradley, a student success advocate.

It could have been due to factors such as a parent losing a job, not having adequate food at home or needing to babysit younger siblings while their parents worked, he said.

Mack’s wellness team, which includes Bradley, is still visiting families and bringing them whatever is needed to improve the situation, everything from food to beds. In exchange, they told parents their kids needed to be in class every day.

“We start making these deals,” Bradley said. “Parents start buying in.”

His dedication to the team’s mission made Bradley one of 20 winners of this year’s Heart of Education Awards, being presented Sunday to Clark County School District educators who excelled during the difficult circumstances of the COVID-19 school shutdown and reopening process.

The awards are presented annually by The Smith Center for the Performing Arts and funded by The Rogers Foundation. The Las Vegas Review-Journal is the print media sponsor for the awards program.

A panel of community leaders and education officials reviewed nominations and selected about 750 finalists. The top 20 school district teachers are receiving a $5,000 cash prize and $1,000 donation to a school program of their choice.

Normally, there’s a red-carpet awards ceremony where winners are announced live on stage at The Smith Center. But for a second year, that wasn’t feasible due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We looked for a new way of doing this to still allow us to celebrate great teaching in a year where teachers really deserve our recognition and our thanks,” said Myron Martin, president and CEO of The Smith Center.

Teachers will be recognized during an hourlong special airing at 8 p.m. Sunday on Vegas PBS on Channel 10.1 or at vegaspbs.org. The program will be repeated at 10 p.m. on Monday and at 3:30 p.m. on Wednesday.

Each teacher was presented with the award during a surprise visit to their school in late April and their reactions were captured on videos that will be featured in the program.

Here are four of this year’s winners:

Jose Israel Ramirez Gamez

A math teacher and graduation advocate at Spring Valley High School, Gamez is credited with helping to boost the school’s graduation rate to above 90 percent for the last several years — including 95 percent one year — all while batting cancer.

Gamez, who has taught for 15 years, most of them in Las Vegas, said he first tries to understand where students are coming from, including their home situation.

“I knew if I was able to understand their behavior in terms of how they do things academically, I was going to be able to help them even more,” he said.

Gamez said that in order to help students graduate on time, it’s important to form relationships with their parents or guardians. In many cases, he said, that bond works wondrously.

Students care about Gamez, too. In January 2020, his students created a GoFundMe page to help him with medical bills, raising $16,083 from 342 donors to date.

Gamez has a rare, aggressive form of adrenal cancer that affects only about one person in a million. He was told by an oncologist in late 2019 he might have only six to nine months to live, but continues to undergo treatment.

Gamez said last week that a tumor has expanded to his liver and he has a few nodules on his lungs. On Wednesday, he had the first in a series of five radiosurgeries.

“I’m feeling strong,” he said. “I’m feeling that we’re going to beat this battle.”

Gamez said he wants to thank his family, students and colleagues for their support. “If we want to accomplish great things in life, we definitely we need a great team nearby us,” he said.

Gamez has been teaching remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic, which he says is a blessing given his health and the need to be extremely cautious. He did a few home visits this school year to check on students, though — particularly, those who weren’t attending school and he encouraged them to come back.

Gamez said he’s hopeful he can heal so he can get back to his classroom in person in the future to “fully teach the way I like to teach” and do more home visits.

Joel Bradley

Bradley has been an educator since 2012 and it’s his third career. He was surprised when he found out he’d won the Heart of Education Award for his efforts during the pandemic.

“I wished that everybody on my team could have gotten it,” he said. “They all deserved it.”

Bradley is part of a 13-person wellness team at Mack, which includes employees such as campus security monitors, counselors and social workers.

Initially, the group figured they would be helping to handle behavioral issues and providing help with technology issues, but the mission morphed into something much bigger, Bradley said.

Thanks to donations, the school has met needs such as providing Thanksgiving meals, furnishing four students’ homes, delivering more than 200 beds and providing food to families in need.

Every time a family at the school is impacted by a COVID-19 case, the goal is to deliver them enough food to last for two weeks.

Bradley himself tested positive for COVID-19 in August 2020, putting a halt to his in-person work while he recovered, and his wife had a severe case of the virus that required hospitalization.

In the fall, the school district caught onto what Mack’s wellness team and a few similar programs at other schools were doing, Bradley said.

Those school efforts became the basis for the school district’s Lifeline program that was expanded to other campuses. In December 2020, the School Board approved using $761,000 in emergency relief funds to buy Panorama Education’s platform to monitor the mental health of students and employees.

A survey through Panorama asks if students want someone from their school to contact them. The first time the survey was administered, 20 percent of students at Mack said “yes.”

“That concerned me,” Bradley said. “That concerned our whole team.”

The wellness team called all of those students in two days. Some students didn’t realize they asked for help and others “just wanted to talk with someone,” Bradley said.

The second time the survey was conducted, 13 percent of Mack students said they needed someone from the school to contact them. The third time, that dropped to 8 percent.

Anna Stein

Stein, a special education teacher at Marion Earl Elementary Schoolwho has been an educator since 1977, retired at the end of last school year from her job as a music teacher at the southwest Las Vegas school.

But after staying home all summer, she came to a conclusion: “I just don’t think I’m ready to really retire.”

So she returned to the school under a retire-rehire program and took a special education position.

In addition to teaching, Stein and her daughter Sierra, 24, offer free tutoring for any children or adults who need it at the East Las Vegas Community Center through their “Tutoria Gratuita para Ninos” (“Free Tutoring for Children”) organization. Volunteers, including many UNLV students, assist with the tutoring.

Stein said she grew up poor and there were times she didn’t have food. “I think for that reason, I appreciate helping people.”

The tutoring, which has been offered for a few years, is open to students from any public or private school.

As a teacher, Stein had about 12 years of experience under her belt in other states before coming to the Clark County School District in 1990. She taught in Laughlin for nearly 20 years before moving to Las Vegas. And she has written a few books in English and Spanish.

Stein said she’s “not super strict” as a teacher, but her students know what to expect and there’s a routine in her classroom. “In return, they give me their all,” she said.

“The children know when you love something and they know when you love them,” she added.

As for winning the Heart of Education Award, “I feel very blessed that they chose me,” Stein said. “It’s kind of nice to be noticed.”

Brenda McNair

A preschool teacher at Eisenberg Elementary School specializing in kids with autism, McNair asked parents during distance learning for feedback on what their children enjoy in order to keep their attention during virtual lessons. Many parents at the northwest Las Vegas school pointed to children’s programing, including YouTube videos.

As a result, McNair watched a lot of children’s programming as well of videos of Las Vegas performers.

“I’m not a performer on a daily basis for entertainment,” she said, but she thought she could emulate how professional entertainers keep their audience’s attention.

She learned “to be very light-hearted,” smile and laugh a lot, McNair said. “All of that together really shaped the way I did the online programming with the students every day,” she said.

She started her distance learning class with music and a puppet show. Ultimately, the goal of revamping her teaching was to improve academics, but student attendance was also a factor.

“We wanted them to keep wanting to come back every day,” she said.

McNair also used the online crowdfunding platform DonorsChoose to get hands-on materials — including paint sets and refrigerator magnets — for her students to use at home. And she continually sought feedback from parents and adjusted her teaching as a result.

“I didn’t mind getting feedback,” she said. “It made me a better teacher in the long run.”

McNair, who has been teaching for more than seven years, said she was “super surprised” and honored to win the Heart of Education Award. “This is something that I would have never imagined of winning.”

The Heart of Education award is not the first time her work has been commended. In 2016, McNair was among 27 special education teachers across the country recognized by the National Association of Special Education Teachers.

Contact Julie Wootton-Greener at jgreener@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-2921. Follow @julieswootton on Twitter.