MINNEAPOLIS — A Minneapolis educator has been selected as the 2024 Minnesota Teacher of the Year.
Tracy Byrd teaches 9th-grade English language arts at Washburn High School. He received the award on Sunday.
"I'm humbled. I am the teacher that didn't do well in school and now here I am as Teacher of the Year," Byrd said.
Byrd is a graduate of Washburn and left a job in finance to begin his career in education, according to a release from Education Minnesota.
Byrd recalled asking himself, "'Do I want to be rich or do I want to be happy?' And so I just chose happiness."
When he first got hired as a hall supervisor at Wayzata High School, he remembered thinking, "'This is perfect. I'll just do this.' And lo and behold, the principal of that time was like, 'No, you're going to go to school and you're going to be a teacher.'"
Byrd ended up enrolling at Minneapolis Community Technical College, then Metropolitan State University.
"I saw myself walking across the stage and was the first person from my family to walk across a college stage. I had my two-year degree and then finished up the final two years at Metropolitan State. Now I'm the first in my family with a four-year degree," Byrd said.
Then Washburn called. A full circle moment for Byrd.
Byrd told Education Minnesota about his goal of making education more accessible for all students.
"There are just some people that... you don't know what you don't know. So at some dinner tables, they just don't have certain conversations. So they don't know what's out there. My conversation, it was never a, 'You are going to go to college. You are going to do this after high school.' There was never that conversation," Byrd said. "So one of the things I do on Wednesdays is I wear a college shirt just so you can start to see all of these different schools out here after high school... community college, four-year colleges, HBCUs. They're all out there."
Byrd is also a track and field coach, former football coach, and runs the scorer's table for the basketball teams.
As the 2024 Minnesota Teacher of the Year, he plans to advocate for students and teachers. Byrd is the third from the Minneapolis district to be named Minnesota Teacher of the Year and the first for Washburn High School.
"I never saw myself as a teacher... and here I am," Byrd said. "So you can do anything, as well. Just don't close the door. Leave all the doors open."
Michael Houston, a math teacher at Harding High School in St. Paul, was the 2023 Minnesota Teacher of the Year.
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