365betÌåÓýÔÚÏßÊÀ½ç±­

The Coconino County Education Service Agency has announced three Flagstaff-based teachers as the finalists for the 2025 Teacher of the Year Award.

All three finalists are teachers in the Flagstaff Unified School District (FUSD). They are Francy Solarte Soto of Coconino High School, Dawn Quamahongnewa of Leupp Elementary School and Joy Bruner of DeMiguel Elementary.

This year's finalists were selected from a group of 24 nominated teachers from across Coconino County.

The winner will be announced at the 12th annual awards ceremony on Thursday, April 17, along with the Rookie Teacher of the Year and the winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award. 

Each finalist will be awarded a cash prize and a nomination for the Arizona Teacher of the Year award. The 2025 Coconino County Teacher of the Year will be presented with a one-year leased vehicle from Flagstaff Findlay Toyota.

The Teacher of the Year award recognizes exceptional educators who are working with preschool through 12th grade students throughout the county. 

Joy Bruner

Joy Bruner has been teaching students at DeMiguel Elementary for over a decade as well as helping to lead the region's Odyssey of the Mind (OM) program.

She has taught at DeMiguel since 2013, including every grade level from kindergarten through third grade, and she had previously substitute taught at the school.

Bruner teaches DeMiguel Elementary’s first grade elementary preparatory academy (EPA) class, an accelerated program that has a dedicated classroom at every grade level in the school. 

“It's been nice at DeMiguel to be able to offer that to students who could really use a challenge and need some more rigor to push them along," Bruner said, "because they're already high-achieving students, and so they just need that extra push to be able to grow even more."

Bruner came to teaching after a previous career in business management. At one point, she decided to pursue work in education and completed two master’s degrees at Northern Arizona University in elementary education and early childhood education.

“I guess I just have a passion for helping kids learn, and I feel like I’m good at it, so I decided to go that direction,� she said.

She said she enjoys teaching younger students and particularly first grade because it’s a “critical year for learning how to read� -- which is something she’s set as a mission for herself.

She said her students� favorite part of the school day is often the Core Knowledge Language Arts curriculum, which includes vocabulary and other background knowledge in engaging lessons. They recently used this curriculum to learn about the American Revolution.

Bruner described her teaching style as “firm but loving.�

“I set clear expectations and they know that I mean what I say; I think that’s good because then they know what to expect from me,� she said. “I have high expectations of my students. I always expect them to do their best, and I know that students are generally able to do way more than we sometimes give them credit for, so I try to push my students to show their best."

She added: "I always tell them that when we have challenges, their brains are just growing.�

In addition to teaching, Bruner is a coach for one of DeMiguel’sOM teams, and she and Stephanie Mansfield, a fourth grade teacher at the school, are the regional OM directors for northern Arizona.

They have been part of the program at the school since 2014.

When her daughter was in third grade, Bruner and Mansfield both had kids who were participating in the school’s OM program one year and decided to try coaching a team the next year. Bruner noted that both Mansfield and April Dent, another teacher at the school, have been impactful to her own work in education.

DeMiguel has sent at least one team to the world championships each year since the program restarted in 2023 after a COVID-19 pandemic-related pause. The school will be sending another team this spring.

Bruner also uses the noncompetitive version of OM in her classroom. Her students are divided into three teams, with each working together to solve a problem. All three teams in her class participated in the Northern Region Tournament at DeMiguel last month, performing skits with handmade props, costumes and a script written by the students. Since the tournament, students in Bruner’s class have been continuing OM activities by working on spontaneous problems.

OM can help students with critical thinking and creative problem-solving in addition to building confidence, she said.

“They learn how to work together in a team -- which is hard for young children -- and I think they gain a lot of confidence because they realize, 'We can do hard things,'� she said. “They had to present their solution, which was their skit, in front of the judges and a big audience, and for some of them that was their first time performing like that.�

Dawn Quamahongnewa

Dawn Quamahongnewa has worked in education for 17 years, with over half of them at Leupp Elementary School.

She'd originally planned to be a lawyer but took a different path after coming across multiple teaching opportunities. She said this was likely inspired by her parents, who both worked in the local school and encouraged their children to be lifelong learners.

Quamahongnewa’s immediate family has all worked in schools -- her mother as a registrar, father as a librarian and brothers as a special education aide and a music teacher.

“It’s from them that I learned the value of education,� she said of her parents. “Even though we all thought I was going to do other things, it’s really because they were in the education field. �. Dad said that we as young people have to go to school to be the voice, the eyes, to be the ears of the elders, and that was why I wanted to be a lawyer. � But now I realize that through education and being a teacher � how many people I have helped or affected, whose lives I've had a chance to be a part of and help them grow."

Quamahongnewa began working with kids during high school and college. After finishing an AmeriCorps position, she moved back to the Hopi Reservation where she grew up and began as a special education aide at the local school, where both of her parents worked.

Quamahongnewa's time in education also includes student-teaching in the elementary school she attended as a child, teaching at STAR School, substitute teaching at Killip Elementary and nine years so far at Leupp. 

Leupp is a part of FUSD but is working almost 40 miles away from the city. Quamahongnewa said she usually starts her day at 5 a.m., as the commute from her home to the school takes an hour and 15 minutes.

Her first three years at Leupp were teaching the school's multiage classroom, which stayed with mostly the same students as they progressed through elementary school.

She now teaches fourth grade.

She said she’s seen Leupp change and grow in the years she’s been teaching there, moving from a C school in the annual letter grades to a B close to becoming an A. The school had one of the district’s largest score improvements in the 2022-2023 school year, jumping from a D to a B, and increased its score again last year.

“It’s so cool to see the change that I got to be a part of,� she said. “We’ve made it such a good school.�

She said she takes a traditional Hopi approach to teaching, developing a warm relationship with her students and holding them accountable.

“What I try to do a lot of times with my kids is to have fun ... to get them to laugh with me," she said. "I find that if I can get them to be happy with me, to see me as someone that isn’t scary all the time, that they enjoy learning from me.

� ... Because we've built that relationship already, they know that even though I have to correct them or tell them to change or what to do better, they know that I’m not saying that to be mean to them [or] hurt their feelings. � I think that because of that they realize I’m a real person."

Quamahongnewa also incorporates Greek mythology and language into her lessons, using them as a unit to teach to English language arts standards.

She double majored in anthropology and classical studies in college, choosing biological anthropology and ancient Greece for her emphases. Her interest in the subject started when she was in elementary school learning about Greek myths for the first time.

“I found a lot of connection between ancient Greek mythology and Hopi mythology and Hopi stories,� she said. � ... It was like, 'Wow, these guys are just like us.' So I wanted to learn all the stories.�

Though students don’t usually learn world history in fourth grade, she uses the topic for a English unit. The class reads the Percy Jackson books (and watches the movie) and Greek myths, and they learn how to write their names in Greek, and group names in the classroom are often Greek letters.

Quamahongnewa explained that these activities teach students about comparing texts, phonemic awareness and even a bit of the history of the alphabet.

She said she hopes students leave her classroom knowing that “learning never ends.�

“[I hope] that they are truly lifelong learners," she said. " � I want them to know that they are able to and can be successful in things that they want to do.�

She added: “It’s not just being able to read and to write, but being able to do those things helps them be good people, helps them be good stewards of the earth and take care of things so the earth keeps going and providing and keeps perpetuating people. They can’t do that if they close themselves off to learning.�

Francy Solarte Soto

Francy Solarte Soto is a Spanish teacher at Coconino High School. Her current classes include Spanish for Spanish Speakers, International Baccalaureate Spanish 3 (IB) and a success class for multilingual learners. Next year, her Spanish 3 class will also be a dual-enrollment course through which students can earn college credit.

She incorporates several other topics and real-world activities in her language classes, encouraging students� involvement beyond the classroom.

“There is no more joy than having love for what it is you do,� Solarte Soto wrote in response to questions. “Despite the challenges faced in our profession, I’d rather focus my attention on what I can control.�

She encouraged other teachers to do the same and to demonstrate their commitment through supporting their students.

She is originally from Colombia, where she earned her bachelor’s degree before completing a Masters of Arts in Teaching Spanish at NAU. She said her mentor teacher at NAU, Yuly Ascención Delaney, was especially influential to her career in how she encouraged her to think about lifelong learning as a practice for herself as well as her students.

“Yuly is a phenomenal educator," she said. "She loves and enjoys her job, she is incredibly dedicated and hardworking, and she is willing to continue learning despite her long career in teaching.�

Ascención Delaney and Solarte Soto coordinate the Club for Spanish Teachers of Northern Arizona, which includes FUSD educators as well as those working in other schools throughout the Flagstaff area. The club meets a few times each semester to share strategies and both successes and challenges for language teaching.

Solarte Soto comes from a family of educators -- her mom and two uncles are both teachers.

She said her experience learning a second language was a major influence on her interest in the process of language learning, as was watching her daughter learn two languages as a young child. 

She chose to teach high school because of the opportunity to see a student's growth between their freshman year and graduation and to help them learn about postsecondary options. She also said high school is an age during which school travel will be meaningful -- she took a group of students to Costa Rica last summer.

One unit in her classes shows students different paths they might take after graduating, with guest speakers visiting to give examples from their own lives.

Solarte Soto says she has an “action-oriented� teaching style, with students taking part in activities reaching beyond the classroom. Some projects in her classes include sending narratives to NAU language students, participating in a human rights letter writing campaign or creating a brochure for other CHS students.

These are intended to “find an authentic audience, give students purpose and create connections.�

“I hope my students take away the understanding that they are more than just their grades or standardized test scores," she said. "Grades and tests do not define them. Of course, we have assignments to complete and grades to submit, but in the end, I want my students to remember their work at the garden, the Hispanic recipes we prepared in class, appreciation for other cultures and languages, critical thinking, collaboration, not perfect verb conjugation or memorization of concepts.�

Solarte Soto said her favorite thing to teach is sustainability, which she has incorporated into her classes for three years now.

“I want to discuss with students how we can improve our quality of life without negatively impacting our planet,� she said. � ... They will be solving the challenges we face now and in the future.�

The class discusses the United Nations sustainability goals, and last year the Spanish for Spanish Speakers 2 and IB senior class collaborated with Nicole Taylor’s (then teaching at CHS, now FHS) multilingual class to work on the school garden using a FUSD Foundation grant.

Solarte Soto said she wanted families and community organizations to know that educators want to work with them.

"We are fortunate to have a rich and diverse community in Flagstaff," she said. "Parents, we want to bring your experiences to our classrooms. Organizations around the county, we want to develop partnerships with you. Teachers, let us continue building a community of learners not only among our students, but also among our parents, coworkers and community leaders.�