Three graduates of Arlington Heights-based Township High School District 214 have returned to their alma maters this academic year, but now in roles as faculty and staff members hoping to teach and guide students as they say happened for them during their own high school days.
Shane Rayburn, a 2019 graduate of Wheeling High School, began teaching automotive classes there this school year.
“I knew I would enjoy teaching but I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” Rayburn told Pioneer Press, recalling his early search for a career.
In high school, he began taking classes in engineering and manufacturing, and discovered that he really enjoyed those subjects.
“When junior year came around, I was asked by some teachers what I thought I might want to do,” he said. “I knew I didn’t want to sit at a desk all day and design stuff, although it’s fun. I didn’t want to do it as a career. They recommended teaching for me and it brought back my passion.”
Rayburn attended Harper College for three years and then Illinois State University where he earned a technology engineering education degree.
He now teaches automotive classes at Wheeling High School that range from “auto systems where we teach them basic maintenance and how to do everyday things that you might need to do on a car all the way up to vocational and engine performance and electronics,” he said.
Students can even earn Automotive Service Excellence certification through courses, he explained.
“It’s such a fun job to get to work with technical stuff all day and also teach kids the joy of working with technical stuff,” said Rayburn.
He said it’s also a joy for him to return to WHS.
“It was one of my dream goals to come back and teach at the district that taught me,” he said. “The school is an awesome school with amazing opportunities.”
Sydney Sadler, who graduated from Buffalo Grove High School in 2019, now teaches her favorite subject, English, there.
“I’ve always loved English,” Sadler told Pioneer Press. “I think that I’m an extrovert in the sense that I like other people’s energy. I love working with other people.”
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During her junior year of high school, Sadler took an advanced placement language course.
“It was really inspirational for me,” she said. “I was learning a way of speaking and advocating for myself.”
She decided that there was “a lot of power in this. I want other people to learn this as well. I want to pass it forward. That was the moment where a spark kind of started and it never faded, it just kept growing.”
Sadler earned a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she also earned a secondary education certification and an ESL English as a Second Language endorsement.
Sadler is teaching honors freshman English and American literature for juniors at BGHS.
Returning to her high school alma mater “is kind of surreal,” Sadler said. “I really love the community.”
There were many obstacles for Jeanette Huerta to overcome as the first-generation Mexican-American daughter of a single mother, she said. She has never forgotten the many ways in which teachers and a social worker at Elk Grove High School eased the way for her.
“I felt a strong connection with teachers who believed in me,” she explained to Pioneer Press. “They helped me sometimes with clothes. I like to tell the story of my cross-country coach who gave me running shoes so that I could join the track team. All those little things that they did for me contributed to who I am and what I’ve become.”
Huerta graduated from the school in 2015 and returned this year as a social worker. She hopes to help other students in need the way that her teachers helped her.
“It’s a long story,” Hurta said of her journey from high school to becoming a teacher.
She attended Benedictine University in Lisle for her freshman year of college. After that, Huerta said she took a gap year to figure out what she wanted to do. She spent that year in the military.
Then in 2017, she attended Olivet Nazarene University in Bourbonnais, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology.
But in 2020, Huerta was deployed to Kuwait.
When she returned from overseas, Huerta went to the University of Illinois where she earned a master’s degree in social work in May. She chose that field because she had formed a connection with the social worker at Elk Grove High School.
She interned at John Hersey High School, another SD214 school, last year.
Huerta didn’t think she’d have a chance to be a social worker at Elk Grove High School but was thrilled when she was hired. She said she has taken on many responsibilities to serve the students.
“I work primarily with the juniors,” she said. “I have a caseload of special education students as well as 504 students” who have mental or physical limitations or disabilities.
Huerta meets with kids individually for counseling sessions, as well as in group settings, and is currently a member of a Hispanic Heritage Month committee.
“The Mexican culture is everything to me. It’s who I am,” Huerta said. “I love the population of students that we have. We’re about a 50% Hispanic, Spanish-speaking student population. I really feel I’ve found a place where I can relate to students and share my experiences because I know these students are going through something similar. Now I get to do for students what somebody else did for me.”
Myrna Petlicki is a freelancer.