McAllen ISD bilingual educator named finalist for award

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Once in the shoes of the students she teaches today, McAllen ISD’s Deisy Trevino, an English language teacher, uses her experience to help students who recently have moved, which earned her to be named among the top five finalists for the Elementary Educator of the Year.

Trevino was selected from more than 100,000 educators, 4,000 schools and 750 school districts. She placed fourth in the category at the 52nd Annual Texas Association for Bilingual Education Conference in Austin on Oct 19.

“It was amazing,” Trevino said. “I was shocked. To be honest, it’s just your hard work paying off and being recognized just feels awesome. Because it’s not only my work, but it’s the students’ results that everything that we did throughout the school year paid off. Seeing their smiles and how much progress they made, it was just very rewarding to get this award on their behalf.”

Being with the district for about five years, she is currently an English language teacher that works with students between second and fifth grade at Seguin and McAuliffe elementaries.

“I’ve been teaching for 13 years already and I was a bilingual teacher for kinder, first, second, third and fourth,” she said. “So, that experience in teaching has helped me with helping our emerging bilinguals in multiple grade levels.”

Summit K12, a provider of online, standards-based supplemental curriculum, announced the 2024 Summies Awards winners and finalists. The awards recognize outstanding work in education, particularly in supporting emergent bilingual students across Texas.

“Basically what the program is, it facilitates the students to practice their English through listening, speaking, reading and writing activities,” she said. “At the end of the school year we have a test called TELPAS that measures their language. So we have a lot of students that are emerging bilinguals that take that test, and we were able to show growth.”

Her selection was based on her exceptional performance in TELPAS, an assessment of the English-language proficiency of students who are learning English, just like she did when she moved to McAllen from Monterrey when she was in kindergarten.

“I came from Monterrey not knowing anything in English myself and I make those connections with the kids,” she said. “I share my experience with them so that I can motivate them … but just giving them the tools and facilitating their learning drives my passion. Just seeing their growth and being their voice, because I feel like we’re still like the minority and we want to make them feel important as well, that they can do it.”

Offering some words of advice for bilingual teachers, she said even with a lot on their plates not to give up and always strive to inspire students.

“We are their voice and we can motivate them to continue their passion,” Trevino said. “I feel like there’s so many things going on right now in the education world and I feel that teachers need to know that their hard work is seen and that everything that we do pays off and to just keep going for the benefit of the students.”

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