Pine Bluff Teacher Competing For People’s Top Teacher Award

A high school teacher at Pine Bluff’s Ridgway Christian School is one of six teachers in line for People magazine’s Teacher of the Year Readers’ Choice award.

Diedre Young, the head of the school’s science department, applied for the contest in hopes of winning a $5,000 cash prize – $4,000 of which would be used to buy badly needed equipment at the school. “I have six microscopes for 110 kids,” she said. The rest of the prize would go to her.

People magazine staff members chose five teachers as Teacher of the Year and then selected six more, including Young, as finalists for the Reader’s Choice award. Voting closes at 11:59 on Sept. 5. Anyone can vote as often as they like at this link. Young is the only finalist teaching east of Tuscon, Ariz., and the only one teaching at a private school.

The six winners, including the Reader’s Choice winner, will be featured in a fall issue of the magazine.

Previously a medical technologist, Young became a teacher while living in the state of Washington before moving to Pine Bluff with her husband. Moving to Pine Buff was a challenge, she said, but she eventually overcame the culture shock. “I really am glad I’m here,” she said. “I feel like I make a difference, and so I’m actually happy to be teaching here.”

Since arriving at Ridgway, she has built two science labs from scratch, the second from a junk-filled storage room that she transformed through grants and donations, including a carload of glassware from the National Center for Toxicological Research. “I begged, borrowed and mooched … to the point where I felt it was a fairly competitive science lab,” she said.

Among her other accomplishments: Students have earned more than $110,000 in science fair scholarships over the past five years. Sixty-five percent of the 2012 graduating class went into a science field. Two students that year had $1.2 million in scholarship offers. Three years ago, she and a teacher in Germany started a blog where students share weather and cultural news. Students from other countries may soon contribute to the blog.

The school serves a diverse population of students from different income groups, though Young said that one survey indicated that 50-60 percent would be eligible for free and reduced lunch prices if the school received federal funds.

“We run the gamut,” she said. “We have a lot of low-income students that come in where the grandparents are literally pulling out of their Social Security to bring them here.”