Meet Former Paraeducator, Classroom Teacher, and Lifelong Education Champion, Haley Sawyer
“Both of my parents are educators, so education is kind of the family business.”
Every day, educators show up and do the critical, and often difficult, work of helping to shape and guide our next generation. So often, this work goes without adequate thanks or support , which is why we wanted to sit down with former classroom educator and lifetime education and children’s advocate Haley Sawyer to get an insight into her journey in the education industry and uplift the amazing effort, care, and dedication of educators like her.
Asked about her path towards her current role as the Marketing and Communications Manager at Stand for Children Oregon, Haley explains that her passion for supporting children and young people has been a life-long endeavor.
“I’ve always worked with the disability community. So, I thought maybe I should try working in a school as a paraeducator. That’s where I got started in my own personal journey with education, working as a one-to-one paraeducator with a 17-year-old student with autism who’s nonverbal. I worked with him for several years because he was in the transitional program that keeps students until they’re 21. It was an amazing experience.”
Through her work as a paraeducator, Haley was able to support in creating integrated classroom spaces, something disability justice advocates, like Amy Waggoner, have pushed for as critical for both general education students as well as those with IEPs.
“I saw firsthand how children have different assets and strengths,” recalled Sawyer. “I worked closely with him, and other students, bringing him into the general education classroom and helping to find the right supports for him to access the content. He’s an amazing artist and he got to shine in ceramics and art.
One of my fondest memories from working at that high school was coaching the unified soccer team, which is a Special Olympics sponsored team at high schools where half the team is made up of disabled students and half is made up of neurotypical, able-bodied students. I think it’s really beneficial for everyone.
I actually don’t know the first thing about soccer. I’m a big fan, but in terms of coaching, I didn’t know what to do, so I recruited half the girls soccer team to join this group and they absolutely loved it. They built strong connections, developed better listening and communication skills. It taught them patience and empathy, and they eventually became advocates for disability justice in their own sense.
Through this paraeducator work, Haley was able to learn more about different ways of expressing intelligence and creativity for each child (and adult!)
“He (her student) would make his own puzzles. He could do puzzles from left to right, top to bottom in order. It was an amazing thing to see just how different kinds of intelligence work— and his was such strong spatial intelligence. We honed those skills and used those strengths to help him access other classes and connect with other students. That period of my life is really meaningful, and it led me to further pursue education as a career.”
Paraeducators are a critical part of the education landscape, providing much needed support to individual students and relief for classroom teachers. Yet, this pool of more than 800,000 paraeducators still face challenges and a lack of clear pathways when transitioning to full-time classroom education.
Still, Haley persevered and charted a path towards her goals of becoming an elementary school teacher.
“I loved my time at the high school, but I knew I wanted to do elementary school. So, I went to grad school and got my teaching license. And that’s how I ended up teaching 4th grade. I love 4th graders — they’re developing such fun personalities, developing their own opinions, and start to grasp things like sarcasm and nuance. We had a ton of fun in class.”
While Sawyer thoroughly enjoyed nurturing young hearts and minds, like many educators, she also ran up against some of the major issues in our current education system that can act as barriers for educators.
“There were things that I felt frustrated by systemically. I’ve always stayed involved in politics, and I tracked a lot of the education policies that would move through the state.
Stand [for Children] championed the Early Literacy Success Initiative in 2023, and that’s how I first became familiar with the organization. I was passionate about that bill because when I started teaching, I noticed there was a huge range of literacy skills within my class.
My district did not offer a curriculum based on the science of reading. And so, I was left to my own devices to just try to make it work.”
This experience is, unfortunately, not unique to Haley. Many teachers report a lack of resources, including curriculum, and must spend many hours outside of their classroom work planning curriculum with little guidance. Like many other teachers, Haley had to rely on her own creativity and the support of her fellow educators to show up for her students and bridge major literacy gaps in her classroom.
“I had a class with a lot of academic needs, and many of my 4th graders really couldn’t read.
I worked with my colleagues, and we created something called the Reading Mountain. It was a traffic cone covered in butcher paper with a spiraling foam road. And along the foam road, there were different skills: short vowels, magic E, digraphs, these different phonics skills up the reading mountain.
We started by assessing students across the grade level, placing them into groups, and providing intervention about four days a week. Each student had a Lego figure with a pin at the bottom. They would stick their character in the foam road at their skill level and track their progress as they moved through the scope and sequence.
At the end of the year, we had a celebration where students reflected on their progress, visually showing the jump they made on the reading mountain by moving their figures from the bottom of the road to the top.
Then, the 5th graders who had gone through the intervention previously would come speak to the 4th graders. They brought copies of the books they were reading at the beginning of 4th grade and the books they are reading now. You could see the difference in complexity.
One of my colleagues students brought a picture book with short vowels, then from behind her back pulled out a mid-level chapter book. She was beaming with pride. Having an older student with status share her journey of struggle and resilience was so impactful.
It eliminated a ton of shame because a lot of students really feel ashamed when they’re struggling with reading, particularly in those upper elementary grades. That’s when social dynamics really start to change. We operated in a shame-free environment.
We operated in a shame-free environment, where the ethos was about working together. And there are no secrets. When you speak secretively about reading group, children feel that. And they assume that shame. So by sharing in the struggle, perseverance, and wins, we eliminated a lot of that.
This wouldn’t have been possible without my amazing colleagues. I loved working with them, and they were my lifeline. Troubleshooting and developing a practice together made me a stronger teacher.
I remember the times when I was creating resources and buying decodable books, and it’s a memory that I look back on fondly because I loved seeing my students succeed. I also think, wow, I wish I didn’t have to do that, and I hope in the future teachers are having to do that less and less.”
It was moments like these that spurred Haley on to working in education advocacy, so future teachers didn’t have to spend hours and their own money trying to patch holes in the education system themselves.
“I was having to make things up as I go to try to meet the needs of my kids who in 4th grade were reading at a kindergarten level all the way to an eighth-grade level. There’s so much differentiation that needs to happen. And teachers need to be able to do that. But I knew that that gap wouldn’t have been as wide had my students received efficacious instruction with materials aligned to the research.
It led me to the realization that I wanted to focus more on this work with literacy. Then, an opportunity came up in Representative Kropf’s office. He was the chief sponsor of the Early Literacy Success Initiative and worked closely with Stand.
So, I spent a year in the state legislature and learned a lot about policy and process and made a lot of great connections along the way. After that year, I was hoping to move toward ed policy and continue to narrow my focus.
Then this opportunity came up with Stand. I couldn’t have imagined a more perfect place for me to land that merged my interests and felt really impactful. And I work with a team of five other women that are the most competent, thoughtful, hardworking people I’ve ever met. We’re small but mighty, and I feel really lucky to have landed here.”
When asked about what drove her to be such a champion for children and education, she immediately gave credit to her parents, both of whom are educators.
“It was absolutely modeled for me. I mean, both of my parents are incredible, dedicated educators, but some of my earliest memories come from my dad. He was a teacher at Jefferson High School in Portland. He was a champion for his students at every level. I know times are different now, but if he knew Joe couldn’t make it to school unless he got a ride, my dad was there to pick him up.
When he knew his kids had unmet needs or some level of scarcity, my dad was there, not just as an educator, but as a human, providing them with access to basic things. So much so that after some of his students graduated, he kept in touch. Those students knew our family. He was an expert at forming these really strong relationships and he was particularly great at connecting with people who up until that point, hadn’t been successful in school, hadn’t had a teacher that they felt connected to.
Those moments were what made me realize that a teacher can make a difference in someone’s life.”
