Blog Posts

Why I Am Thankful for Public Education

Published by OurPublicSchoolsWork.org

Kathy Nimmer

November 19, 2025

Meet 12 creative writing students who changed everything for me.

The 4-H champion who wrote mysteries just as skillfully as he raised goats.
The Hispanic girl who created spoken-word poetry about her heritage and found eager admirers in her classmates.
The star athlete who appreciated a place to escape stopwatches, drills, and the ominous twang of a fraying hamstring.
The valedictorian who was learning how to thrive outside the scientific formulas she’d always embraced.
The German exchange student who knew that originality was the same in any language.
The senior who had already mentally checked out, but little by little, quietly, was checking back in, in spite of himself.
The girl with special needs who took the class so she could dream, overriding everything her IEP described.
The recovering addict who handed me pages of soul-wrenching free-writes like the sacred artifacts they were.
The “band nerd” whose easy laughter reflected the culture she had internalized as she hummed and paced and conducted an unseen orchestra.
The boy with autism who shimmied with happiness as he commanded worlds that his imagination created.
The student taking four AP classes who rediscovered wonderment.
The new student whose lilting voice and strumming guitar hands enchanted his classmates just as much as did his panoramic smile and fluttery writing style.

Then came that Friday, a day of open sharing. It started when #12 began to sing and play, and #9 sprung up to do her thing. Soon #2, #5, and #11 chimed in, and #6 began to bob his head, just a little, while #8 rose to sway gently next to #10 whose imagination ignited. Then, soon, it was all of them, every single one:

The student who was in love for the first time, had a peer of the same skin color in class for the first time, earned a B for the first time, lost a family member for the first time, had a blind teacher for the first time …

The bold/sad/graceful students, the struggling/silly/sheltered students, the daring/curious/quiet students …

All of them. They sang, and they danced, and they forgot themselves, and in doing so, they exemplified the terribly complex and tremendously wonderful beauty of public education.

Where else could such joy exist NOT as a one-size-fits-all, monochromatic canvas, but instead, as a vibrant, multi-dimensional mosaic that I will never ever forget? Only in public education.

For these big moments and the small ones, for the privilege of being an educator who witnesses these moments, for the absolute right of ALL students to have these moments, I am—and always will be—thankful for public education.

Flourishing with a Guide Dog

Guiding Eyes for the Blind Newsletter Contribution
November 22, 2025

My three-decade career as a public high school English teacher brought me into many positions of influence, especially when I started working with guide dogs. I could move safely through the halls of my school, take students on field trips, enter conference rooms for important meetings, travel for professional development, and ultimately stand tall and proud as the 2015 Indiana Teacher of the Year and finalist for National Teacher of the Year. Simultaneously, my love for motivational speaking, mentoring, and writing flourished with a guide dog by my side. With every speech I gave, every mentoring session I led, and every story I wrote, I could embrace the same professionalism as my sighted peers because my dog evened the playing field, giving me the space to pour into my work without needing to focus on all of the things made harder because of my blindness.

What was never my primary thought was how my life choices were influencing the public's overall regard for disability, but that was happening anyway. Being named the winner of the 2026 Helen Keller Achievement Award is a startling and humbling realization of how our stories are being written by the choices we make, at the same time that those around us are noticing those choices. I'm still making sense of this because I haven't always succeeded or done the noble thing. I have, however, kept taking that next step, always driven by purpose and a passion to serve others, and for the last 30 years, side-by-side with a dog who guides and loves me, on both the mountain tops and in the valleys. Would I have found those mountain tops if I didn't have a guide dog? I'm doubtful, and I can't honestly picture that anyway. My story will include a harness handle gripped in my left hand for as long as it is possible, which means to me that anything is possible.

I Will Meet You There

November, 2025

This tree in front of my house speaks to my heart.

It does not ask to turn brilliant red in the fall. It would have been happy enough to remain green, yet when crimson leaves like jewels take over, a story is written, one where good things come from changing seasons. Better than "good things," actually, stunning and amazing and God-gifted things.

Some parts of my world are feeling a little like this lately. I can't make sense of it fully. So, instead of trying to analyze it all, this moment, I am simply choosing to stand in wonderment.

Might I challenge you this evening? When beautiful things like this are yours, will you stand in awe with me rather than chasing the why? Just be present. Just be in amazement. Just be grateful.

I will meet you there, in this season or even just in this single moment of wonderment, by a tree like this one.

Looking Up and To The Side

Drifting Upward

When I run photos of myself through my accessible photo description app, more often than not, it says that my eyes are looking upward and to the side. The app classifies this position as me being distracted or thoughtful.

Truth is, my eyes drift and dance and dawdle and dive, and unless my brain commands them to do something specific, they drift upward and to the side.

I think this started when the peripheral vision that lingered the longest was in the part of my right eye that was nearest my nose, so I turned my eye to center that residual site. As time went on and my vision disappeared, my eye control diminished.

One eye doctor performed surgery on my wandering right eye, tightening the muscles to pull the eyeball back. It lasted for less time than it took me to write this post, or so it seemed.

One child in a classroom I observed, too young to know differently, asked why I had zombie eyes.

I wore tinted glasses for a few years around the Teacher of the Year time, partly to shelter me from the brightness of Spotlights and partly, to be honest, to hide my wandering eyes.

I don't hide them now. I don't think of them very often. Maybe I don't care as much? Maybe lots of other things seem much more important? I don't realize how drifty they can be, until suddenly I do and I'm the only one in a group photo who looks distracted or thoughtful.

There's no huge Lesson here, no take away to change the world. It's just me, being curly-haired and tall and passionate and perpetually distracted or thoughtful. I might invest some imagination to create a story about what it is that my sightless eyes are looking at when they drift upward and to the side, just to have a spiffy answer if and when people wonder about it. I might not, though, because just like the calluses on my hands from making jewelry and the scar on my knee from a fall, these eyes are mine, part of me, my own story, and definitely NOT what I use to see this world so vividly.

I'm glad these eyes of mine drift upward rather than downward: it seems a whole lot more hopeful. And, if I speak symbolically for a moment, we are all looking at the world differently anyway, through the lens of our experience and our beliefs, so maybe I am the cool one who actually models that truth. Plus, it isn't a terrible thing to be distracted or thoughtful, or just a little different, or focused on something that can't be seen by the human eye.

Kathy Nimmer, Oct. 2025