Not everyone gets to work in their dream job. Plans change, priorities shift, life happens — the list goes on. The hope, though, is always that at the very least, we land doing something we enjoy.
That was the case for Julie Ward. At 51 years old, she found something she loves after a career shift: teaching. She’s now a paraeducator who helps teach math and reading to Title I students at Woodburn Elementary School in Camas.
Title I schools have higher percentages of children in poverty and are given more funding to help those students succeed with additional academic support, including hiring paraeducators, who assist teachers in various capacities.
Paraeducators need at least two years of study in higher education, including an associate’s degree or higher, or they can pass an assessment test. They work under supervision of the teacher.
After only two years in the job, primarily focusing on going from classroom to classroom to help teach students different and newer techniques to understand and solve math problems, Ward has helped bump up the number of students meeting government standards for the Smarter Balanced assessment test. In the 2015-2016 school year, 67 percent of fourth-graders were meeting standards. That jumped to 75 percent in the 2016-2017 school year. The percentage of fifth-graders meeting standards jumped from 50 percent to 72 percent, according to the school.
For this work, Ward was named the Educational Service District 112 Regional Classified Employee of the Year, recognized at a reception at the Washington State Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction in Olympia last month.
“She is a teachable spirit, and she’s committed to learning. She works really hard to meet her kids’ needs, because she wants to grow as a person and as a teacher,” said Woodburn Elementary Principal Brian Graham. “I’m impressed by the way that she views education and the way that she views herself as a learner, as well. That makes a huge difference in kids.”
Indeed, Ward, with a big smile and sparkle in her eye, said she loves “just seeing their growth from the beginning and working on their strategy and working with it, then understanding it and seeing them successful over and over again” on math problems.
“There are many different ways to go about getting the solution or the answer, so what I’ve done is made myself the best I can be, to learn as many strategies as I can. The way one student might look at a math problem isn’t the same way another student is going to look at a math problem,” she said.
Getting to this spot in life, happily teaching elementary students, hasn’t been a breeze, though. The Camas High School graduate didn’t go to school to work in education. She wanted to be a broadcast journalist.
Back in the mid-’90s, Ward was fresh out of the University of Portland’s communication school. She had studied broadcast journalism for six years — first earning an associate’s degree in television production and broadcasting at Clark College before transferring to University of Portland.
Ward was lucky in the competitive world of journalism after college, scoring an internship at Portland television station KATU Channel 2, an ABC affiliate station. Eventually that gave way to a full-time job in other capacities, including a camera operator and floor director for “AM Northwest” and the 5 p.m. newscast.
The schedule was erratic and unpredictable, as is the case for many jobs in journalism. After working there for two years, and although she was passionate about it, Ward was faced with a tough decision: endure or leave? A 2015 University of Kansas study found female journalists were at higher risk of burnout; more women look to leave the industry feeling that they don’t have the support they need if they want to spend time with or decide to have a family, according to the study. Ward decided to leave.
“It was a hard decision for me. It took me six years to get through school because I was working at the same time. (Broadcast) was something that was my goal, that’s what I wanted to do, but I wanted to see my husband and be there,” she said. “I would go to work, I’d come home and get called back in when the weather was bad. We couldn’t plan anything.” She said that the commute from Portland to her home at the time in Washougal was too inconvenient, and she would at times sleep on the floor at the station.
Facing additional struggles, Ward’s husband was laid off at Crown Zellerbach, the local paper mill, where she also had once worked part time as a napkin department secretary. Ward then took a job at the Camas-Washougal Post-Record as an advertising manager from 1996 to 2004. She and her husband had a son and she left to be a stay-home mom for six years.
When she wanted to return to work in 2011, she discovered substitute teaching.
“Then I could sub, work part time, get my son off to school in the morning and be there for him when he’s done, which was important to me,” Ward said. “At the same time, I could work and bring home some extra money.”
Eventually, the full-time job as a paraeducator helping students in need opened up, and she fell in love.
“I feel like I’ve found my calling. I love this school that I’m at,” Ward said.
