Monroe teacher honored by students with award nomination

Published 1:30 am Sunday, June 21, 2026

MONROE — She was nominated by her own students.

“I teared up,” Monroe teacher Sabrina Shaw said in an interview. “It’s great to be acknowledged and honored for any work that you do, but to be acknowledged by the students who you do that work for and with, that’s the biggest honor that I could receive.”

National History Day is the largest student history organization in the country, engaging more than half a million students each year. This year, Shaw was nominated as a National History Day Teacher of the Year.

She teaches at Sky Valley Education Center in Monroe, an alternative learning school for students K-12. For grades K-5, Shaw teaches an outdoor field science class. For grades 6-10, the program focuses on environmental studies.

“We cover science, language arts and history,” Shaw said. “And then art and PE. So they get their core classes but it’s all integrated.”

Students help decide the curriculum and the topics of study.

Last school year, students wanted to learn about microplastics so they took a field trip to Olympia and met with a salmon advocate, Shaw said. The students wrote letters to state officials advocating for the Salish Sea.

Getting out of the classroom is an important part of the program, Shaw said. They have a bus that takes them “anywhere we want to go,” she said.

“It’s really focused on kids, place-based learning and who are they and what do they want to learn,” Shaw said. “They have a lot of voice in their education.”

Each year, Shaw has her students prepare a project based on the National History Day theme. It can be an exhibit, a website, a documentary, a performance or a historical paper.

Once submitted to their school, select projects advanced to a regional contest. The top two from each region advanced to the national competition at the University of Maryland, which took place last week. Nearly 3,000 students competed and awards were presented by age and category.

This year’s theme was “Revolution, Reaction, Reform in History,” exploring the blurred distinctions between the three.

“I’m asking them to do this really dedicated project for the course of a year, and yet they still love me afterward,” Shaw said.

During the award ceremony, two teachers also received Teacher of the Year awards, one for the middle school division and one for the high school division. Seventy-eight teachers were nominated from across the country. Shaw was nominated in the middle school division.

Teacher of the Year awards were presented Thursday, and unfortunately Shaw was not one of the recipients.

“I’m okay with not winning,” Shaw said in an email. “I prefer to work hard and highlight the amazing things my students accomplish.”

However, a Shaw still went home with an award last week as her 13-year-old daughter, Emogene, won first place in the junior individual exhibit category.

“As a teacher, I’m incredibly proud of the scholarship and energy she’s put into all of her projects,” Shaw said. “As a mother, I was moved to tears watching her move throughout the entire project.”

Emogene consistently went beyond the requirements of the class assignment, Shaw said, displaying passion and persistence in reaching her own goals.

“I’m so excited that she received the gold medal but it’s great to see that hard work recognized amidst such great competition,” she said.

Shaw started her teaching career in 2002 when she moved to Stanwood from Oregon. Before that, she worked for the Southern Oregon Historical Society.

As a kid, she hated history, Shaw said. In school, history was more “reading comprehension” than it was understanding the past and how it affects the present, she said.

She gained a love of history in college because of a particularly engaging teacher, Shaw said.

“He was talking about being a CIA agent during the Cold War,” she said. “He had coached for the Ugandan basketball team.”

She loved the stories he told, and at the historical society, she got excited about teaching, Shaw said.

She enrolled Emogene at Sky Valley Education Center in 2018, and became a parent-teacher a year later.

The unique learning style offered at Sky Valley and the opportunity to create her own program led her to become a full-time teacher in 2020.

Taylor Scott Richmond: 425-339-3046; taylor.richmond@heraldnet.com; X: @BTayOkay