TEACHER FEATURE
Editor’s note: This is the second of a series of stories that introduce new teachers at Tracy schools.
Some people are born to teach. Jessica Novosad is one of them, but her path to the classroom had an interesting detour.
Tracy Area Elementary School’s newest teacher entered college in Colorado as pre-physical therapy/kinesiology major, but would later switch to education. The move allowed her to continue to work with children, only in a much different setting.
“I’ve always wanted to work with kids, and I wanted to do pediatric physical therapy,” she said. “I volunteered at Children’s Hospital in Denver, and it was like, ‘I can’t do this.’ To see some of the kids and why they were there — when families start calling it ‘physical torture’ — it was so hard. A lot of them had cerebral palsy and physical disabilities. I didn’t want to be the person who’s not fun to come to.”
A native of Colorado, Novosad moved to Fort Lupton in middle school and graduated from high school there. She started her post-secondary education at the University of Colorado-Boulder before changing her major to education and earned that degree at the University of Wyoming.
For Novosad, watching kids learn and how they progress through the school year are the main things that have kept her in the field for 20 years.
“It’s the excitement they bring to the building, to everybody’s day,” she said.
Novosad met her husband, Marshall native and fellow TAES teacher Lucas Novosad, in Colorado. They taught in Rifle, CO — Jessica for 10 years, Luke for eight — got married in 2016 and made their way to Albert Lea where they made their home for three years before settling in Marshall, where she taught for six years.
Novosad will be teaching English as a Second Language for part of her day and will also be working as an interventionist with students who need extra support in reading and math.
“We look at students who need extra help in reading and math,” she said.
Working with children who struggle academically presents unique challenges that other teachers might not have to deal with. For Novosad, the key is figuring out how these students learn the best. She said the first step is getting to know them and their interests.
“Getting to know them as an individual,” she said. “Then, how can I take those interests and bring them into what they’re learning — making it more hands-on rather than just paper, pencil, book.”
Novosad has plenty of experience with children, having taught kindergarten for four years and fourth grade for another two in Colorado. She was also a special education teacher for three years and taught ESL for a year before the move to Minnesota. She taught an ESL class in Albert Lea for two years and second grade for a year, which precipitated the Novosad’s move to Marshall, where she taught ESL at Park Side for another six years while Lucas taught in Tracy.
She said she enjoys a small classroom setting that Tracy offers, compared to other larger schools she has taught at.
“You get to know the families better, know the kids, see them out in the community and recognize them,” she said. “I’m excited to meet new students, being in a new building.”
That said, there is another perk to teaching in Tracy. Working at TAES means she gets to be around her family every day as opposed to watching them leave for Tracy every morning with their father while she stayed back to teach in Marshall. The Novosad’s daughters, Meike (third grade) and Joey (first grade) go to school at TAES, and their son, Reese, is a preschooler at St. Mary’s “ All of us will be in Tracy this year,” she said. “That was the biggest deciding factor for coming to Tracy. It’s just being together as a family and being on one schedule. Being in Marshall, I felt like I missed out on a lot of things that were happening. (Lucas) got to hear their car ride conversations; when they got home, they didn’t want to talk about it anymore — they’re like, ‘I already told this story!’ Now I get to be a part of those. Now we get to share the wealth.”
The Novosads still live in Marshall and Jessica gets asked frequently when they will make the move to Tracy.
“We get asked that a lot,” she said. “When the perfect situation arises, we might (move) … it’s definitely on our radar; it’s not something that we’re opposed to. In the wintertime, driving from Marshall to here is not the easiest.”
