Bowman Chosen As Top Teacher

Aryn E. Bowman, daughter of Keith and Dottie Bowman of Randolph Center and a RUHS ’98 graduate, was honored this past September as the Oakland (Calif.) Unified School District’s Teacher of the Year. The district has 40,000 students.

Bowman began teaching in Oakland in the fall of 2005 through Teach For America, a national corps of outstanding college graduates who commit two years to teaching in the country’s most underserved school districts. In her first year, she taught tenth grade English and social science, and the next year cycled through with her students, teaching the group of 120, eleventh grade US history. This group of students went on to score higher than any other students in Oakland on their mandatory eleventh grade US history examination in May of 2007, beating not only the district’s average score, but the state average as well, and the average of more affluent districts surrounding the city.

This year, Bowman is again teaching the same group of students, in their twelfth grade year, in advanced placement and regular American government and economics. She will have taught this group of students for three years when they graduate in June 2008, and many of them will begin their first year of college that fall, for some, the first in their families to do so.

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