Becky Jester

When Bill Clinton was governor, his administration initiated formal professional development for teachers.  Today, each certified teacher must have 60 hours of professional development in his or her particular field each year.  Here at Dawson Education Cooperative, we help teachers secure those hours of training and make sure that they receive quality training across six counties.  Our training pool includes 3,400 teachers.  I also work closely with 24 school superintendents who guide our operations as members of our board of directors.  We are funded through the state and through grants, thus accountability is our number one priority.

Dawson Co-Op could be located anywhere in the region, but we chose Clark County for the community support.  For example, any time we have a conference on campus, the downtown Honeycomb Restaurant will bring over menus and have the meals ready when we arrive for lunch.  Our teachers can walk around downtown during their breaks and businesses are just so nice to us.  In return, we support our local retail and dining establishments and take advantage of catering.  The university bookstores have even said that they know when Dawson Co-Op is hosting a group because they can see the increase in business.

Dawson's staff includes literacy specialists, math specialists and more who are on hand to train the teachers and sometimes school leaders who return home to train their teaching staff.  When I first came to the co-op, we had 35 employees.  Today, we employ 172, all with a background in education.  I taught in schools for twenty-two years and have spent 18 more at Dawson.  One of these days I'm going to retire, but until then it's my personal mission to help our educational cooperative grow and succeed.