COVINGTON, Ga. — DeAnna O’Brien says she gets the greatest satisfaction from her job when she sees one of her special education students functioning independently outside the walls of Eastside High School.

“What it’s taught me is to celebrate all the little steps that make you into the person that you are,” she said.

“We can all have these huge, lofty goals that we all shoot for five or 10 years down the road. But we cannot overlook all the little things that got us there — carrying your own lunch, logging onto the computer by yourself.

“The first day that they’re able to walk to class by themselves and you can hang 10 feet back — it’s amazing. There are 1,500 kids in this school — it’s intimidating to walk down the hall by yourself,” she said.  

O’Brien was named the Newton County School System’s 2022 Teacher of the Year on Thursday, Sept. 30. She was chosen from among three finalists who also included fifth-grade teacher Samantha Greco of West Newton Elementary School and sixth-grade science teacher Clayton Hammonds of Veterans Memorial Middle School. 

Teachers choose their school’s Teacher of the Year to represent them in the competition for the school system award.

In her speech after the announcement of her award Sept. 30, O’Brien said “what touched me the most” was that her colleagues voting for her meant they “noticed my kids.”

O’Brien explained to The Covington News that other teachers voted for her despite them having little contact with her students throughout the day.

“It’s certainly not intentional, I don’t think,” she said. “It’s just the way the schedule is.”

O’Brien’s students remain with her and paraprofessionals Maria Hardeman and Sande Jackson in a self-contained classroom most of the day. Other teachers rarely see her five students — who “can’t always voice for themselves” and need someone else to speak for them, she said.

“You see all these accolades for grade point averages and scholarship winners and our athletes who are being recognized for the sporting goals they have met,” said O’Brien, who also is Eastside’s swim team head coach.

“Ours (students) are sometimes just not as noticeable to the general public, and even to the school. But they’re just as amazing. Their goals are just not as widely celebrated,” she said. 

However, she said other teachers saw her students — all of whom are handicapped in some way — were progressing in a number of areas.

“The reason my colleagues saw me as Teacher of the Year was, obviously, they saw what my kids were doing and not what I was doing,” she said. “Nobody comes in here and watches me teach every day.” 

O’Brien has students who work as interns for the school’s athletic department or media center. “Things like that” allow special education students to “showcase what they can do,” she said. 

“We need to build the steps for that to happen,” O’Brien said.

It also allowed her students to meet other teachers or students whom they normally would never meet, she said. For example, O’Brien created programs last school year in which her students interviewed Eastside teachers and, separately, allowed regular education students to work with her students.

Despite COVID prompting the school system to teach many students virtually for part of the 2020-21 school year, administrators allowed O’Brien’s students to return to in-person classes earlier than others because of the greater need for in-person training in special education.

She said she taught five students in person last year, in addition to “a few” virtually. Virtual teaching was especially challenging because of being unable to use various visual and vocal prompts teachers often need to keep special education students focused during in-person teaching, O’Brien said. 

Their families or caregivers also were required to help her students use the technology required for virtual learning and some found it difficult to do so, she said.

Eastside’s media specialist and others helped O’Brien develop a QR code and insert photos of her and other teachers into locations on the screen students saw that allowed them to log into and use online meeting platforms like Zoom without having to type in user names and passwords, she said.

“It took a lot of practice,” she said. 

“We had to change the way we taught. Every lesson, we had to start with some sort of movement just so I could get them to understand, ‘We’re going to pay attention.” We would do yoga or types of stretching so that they knew they had to be watching.”  

O’Brien, 48, is a native of the Chicago area and moved with her family to the Atlanta area at a young age. She grew up in Clayton County and earned her undergraduate degree from Georgia Southern University in 1995.

She then taught in Rockdale County for two years before moving to work for three years with young Scottish Rite Hospital patients who had suffered traumatic brain injuries.

Her six children range in age from 22 to 13 and two of them are Eastside students, she said. Around 2000, O’Brien began a 15-year hiatus from teaching to raise her six children and work as a youth minister at Catholic churches in Newton and Gwinnett counties, she said.

She returned to teaching special education in 2017 in Morgan County and moved to Eastside the following year. 

O’Brien said the experience of winning the title was “surreal.” 

She said she “doesn’t have room to cook” because the numerous bouquets of flowers she received fills the kitchen of her Social Circle home.

It also included students and a band performance greeting her when she arrived on campus after she won the title.

O’Brien arrived in a 2021 Ford Bronco convertible provided by Covington Ford’s Matt Crowe.

“(Crowe) even let me stand up in the back seat and wave to everybody,” O’Brien said. “It was a lot of fun.”