Maumelle Educator of the Year teaches life skills to students

MAUMELLE — The teaching job that Ashley Washam has is one many people would find impossible to do, but she calls it “a huge breath of fresh air.”

She is the life-skills teacher at Maumelle Middle School for a classroom of significantly disabled children.

“These kids have taught me more than I’ve taught them,” she said, starting to cry.

Washam was named Educator of the Year by the Maumelle Area Chamber of Commerce at its January banquet.

She was nominated by Michelle Elliott, the parent of a former Maumelle Middle School student. Elliott called Washam “an ideal candidate” for the award.

In addition to teaching, Washam coaches the cheerleaders, is in charge of homecoming, serves as a mentor teacher, is the school’s parent-teacher-student organization faculty representative and is a member of Maumelle’s planning committee for an inclusive playground.

“I’ve seen firsthand Ashley become a warrior for her students,” Elliott wrote. “She will fight for them to have every opportunity with the ferociousness of a momma bear. Teaching these children is not a job for Ashley; it’s a calling.”

Washam, who has taught for 21 years, said she’s been back in the public-school setting for four years. She previously worked in the Searcy School District and The Centers for Youth and Families day-treatment program.

Washam, 47, grew up in Plano, Texas, and comes from a long line of educators.

“Mom was a teacher. My grandmother was a librarian and school secretary,” Washam said. “My other grandmother taught until they said, ‘You have to retire.’ My aunt is 74 and the dean of students at St. Andrews, a private school in Jackson, Mississippi.”

She said “they were all pretty excited” that she won the Educator of the Year award.

Instead of studying to be a teacher, she went to the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, planning to major in public relations. Washam said she started taking history classes, which she loved more than her communications classes. Then she wasn’t sure what to do next.

She talked to her aunt, Julia Chadwick in Mississippi, who taught history and English for years, and she encouraged Washam to become a teacher. Washam said her mother, Margie Eldridge, did, too.

Washam’s undergraduate degree is in social studies, and she did student teaching in West Fork.

“Growing up in Plano, Texas, it was a huge culture shock, because it had the most rural bus routes in the state at the time. It was nothing I had ever been around,” she said. “It was the have and the have-nots. It was real interesting; it was a good place for me to be at so I could see a different side of the world with that many kids coming in in poverty and not having things I’d always had. I got a lot out of that.”

In Maumelle, “we have a good mix, and I enjoy having that good mix,” Washam said.

She also remembers a boy with Tourette syndrome who was in her class at West Fork.

“I felt like he fell through the cracks,” she said.

When she was home in Texas one summer, she worked with special-needs children during summer school.

“I loved it,” she said. “I liked that personal experience with the kids instead of having a class with 30.”

Washam went to Northeast Louisiana University, now the University of Louisiana at Monroe, to get a master’s degree in special education. She worked as a graduate assistant to pay her way.

She was inspired by a teacher there, Walter Creekmore, who has since died.

“He was very eclectic, but he really helped guide me down the right path,” Washam said. “I gained so much more knowledge there when I was getting my master’s. I gained a whole lot of practical knowledge from him. The most useful class I took was Interacting With Parents of Special-Needs Children. He tied it into the seven stages of grieving so we could relate to these parents — how to best understand them, communicate with them.

“I will never forget that class; I use it all the time. My skill set came from there, totally. I’m very grateful for him.”

Washam and her husband, Gary, whom she met while in college, got married in 1996 and moved to Maumelle for the first time in 1997.

Her first teaching job was at Oak Grove Junior/Senior High School in Pulaski County, a special-education class with three students.

“It was a behavior class. The first day of school, one of my students ran away from school. That threw me right into the fire,” she said. “My class size grew … mostly behavior problems. I had a student with autism; that’s why I was hired.”

She also sponsored the dance team and helped with the cheerleaders.

After three years, she left for a teaching position at The Centers for Youth and Families at its day treatment center in Little Rock.

“To be honest with you, that was in 2001-2002, and that was my favorite job ever in my life,” she said. “I was with the best team.”

She said children were bused to the center from all over Pulaski County.

“I saw some really sad cases,” she said.

The program was consolidated, and Washam was transferred to another facility in the city within The Centers for Youth and Families.

“I loved that job. I had six kids who were in residential treatment that I taught every day,” she said.

Children have to be referred to the program by mental-health counselors and physicians. Washam dealt with children who had been sexually abused, children with all kids of emotional disturbances.

“We would see kids you’d hear horrible cases about on the news,” she said. “They’d be with us three months to a year. … We would get a lot of kids who were in foster care. We would help them heal as much as we could. I worked with a great mental-health team.”

Washam said her husband, Gary, was working for a trucking company; he also became a homebuilder.

“We’re just very service-

oriented people,” she said. “Homebuilding made us know our mission in life more than anything we experienced.”

Washam said her husband decided to go to nursing school to make more of a difference.

The family, including their daughter, Aynsleigh, moved to Beebe while he attended the University of Arkansas Community College at Batesville.

She taught in the Searcy School District, in “a K-6 behavior class; it was my toughest job,” she said. “It was hard.”

However, she said she enjoyed those children and had the opportunity to take “great professional development,” includng reading and math programs that have been useful in her career.

The family moved back to Maumelle five or six years ago, and she returned to teaching and working at the The Centers for Youth and Families. The work was still on her heart, she said.

When Aynsleigh was in the sixth grade, she was in a private school, but she wanted to go to Maumelle Middle School, and they agreed. The couple found out that their daughter had a 1-inch hole in the upper chambers of her heart, and she had surgery during the seventh grade.

“I could not have asked for a better group of people to go through that with,” Washam said of the staff at Maumelle Middle School.

Washam said she’d been looking at different jobs, and because of the “amazing experience with the staff and administration,” she applied for the community-based instruction position, now called the life-skills class.

Washam said she was nervous because it had been so long since she had worked with “significantly disabled children,” but her husband encouraged her to apply for the position.

“He said, ‘I think you’ll be great at it,’” she said.

Maumelle Middle School Principal Ryan Burgess agreed.

He said Washam’s position is “one of the most, if not the most, challenging positions we have in the school” because of the student population she serves.

“For her to be able to take those students with all their varying disabilities and still get them to focus and grow as students is just remarkable to me,” he said.

Burgess said Washam has raised the test scores of her students, while helping them gain independence in their lives.

“Their test scores were part of our school’s turnaround. We were in [state] school improvement when I came here,” he said. The school’s state report card grade went from a D to a C, he said, “and she’s definitely a contributor to all that happening.”

Washam said her life-skills position is fulfilling.

“It’s taken the place of my day-treatment job,” she said, tearfully. “It’s been a great change. I have some who are verbal and some who aren’t, but watching the growth in them — watching one of them wave for the first time or reach for something — and the one who didn’t make any noises, now he’s reaching for his milk. It’s engaging them.

“We go out in the community a lot. There’s nothing more exciting than seeing a kid at the state fair for the first time ever.”

The students she has who are 14 or older, as well as those in another life-skills class, volunteer at the Arkansas Foodbank and the senior center and take care of the recycling program at the middle school.

“It helps them get that vocational training they need,” she said.

Washam said she has students in wheelchairs and two students with visual and hearing impairments.

“I’ve had to get more creative this year because my kids the past couple of years have been more independent. I’m cutting and Velcroing and making … new work stations for them. It’s very individualized; I’m not into one size fits all. I enjoy it, and I just enjoy seeing them happy,” she said.

“My goal is right now — I have a student teacher, and I really would like to see more young people go into teaching and go into this field because it’s needed, and I won’t be teaching forever. I like working with the younger teachers. It’s the first time I’ve had a student teacher,” she said, adding that the student is from the University of Central Arkansas in Conway.

Washam is also a mentor teacher for first- and second-year teachers.

“That really has been interesting to me. It’s been very eye-opening in just how different colleges focus on different things, so it’s been fun to offer support to these new teachers, because they need it,” Washam said.

“I definitely want to continue what I’m doing,” she said. “I don’t see the need for a change anytime soon. I’m not 100 percent sure, but I may get a counseling certificate someday.

“I’m a good listener. If we have an emergency or crisis, I listen. That’s my role.”

Elliott also wrote in Washam’s award-nomination letter that “Ashley teaches, nurtures and brings out the best in our most vulnerable of Maumelle students.”

That’s not a job just anyone can — or wants to — do.

Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.