On a Friday in mid-September Kim Jaquint sat in her new-ish classroom in the Haines School getting settled in.
The new special education teacher was still in the process of decorating the room. There are some bright pops of color and a few owls up already.
“I think it’s so important,” she said. “People want you to get your paperwork done and they want you to get those things done, and I think that’s very important to get done,” she said. “But my first round of attack is – I can’t make any of that happen if kids don’t want to be in here, right?”
Jaquint was hired to do special education with grades six through twelve, but is currently just working with seventh- through twelfth-grade students. Broadly, her job is to make sure students in the district have access to education appropriately.
“Whatever the barrier would be to learning, we would find a way to minimize those barriers,” she said.
That could be everything from kids with learning disabilities, to those whose physical disabilities are a barrier to accessing resources, to others who have trouble demonstrating that they’ve learned information.
Jaquint said she found her way into special education accidentally.
“So when my first child was born, I lived a block away from a high school. My actual expertise is behavior, I am a behavior specialist,” she said. “I was looking for employment that was close to home so that I could get home and take care of my child.”
There was a paraprofessional position open in the school’s behavior program.
“Human behavior … fascinates me. The brain fascinates me,” she said. “I was there in that contract for one year. And I was in that one year with some pretty hardcore teenage boys and that worked out for me. I was hooked, I was absolutely hooked.”
Jaquint said she’s been teaching for nearly 30 years and when she retired from teaching in Wisconsin, she decided to start looking for a job in the state.
“Alaska has been on my bucket list for a long time,” she said.
She got a rapid response when she put an application in on a site that connects teachers with available positions.
“One night I went in… I put in the application on that site and then Roy called me the next morning, I interviewed in the afternoon, he called me in the evening, I accepted the next morning, and I was in my car … headed up three weeks later and here I am,” she said.
“I traveled through Canada for six days with me and my three cats and my jeep and with as much as I could fit in that jeep,” Jaquint said, who got to Haines on Aug. 30.
She and her three rescue cats, Twiggers, Zoe and Comet, spend a lot of time together in a space Jaquint said superintendent Roy Getchell and principal Lilly Boron helped her find.
“I have a great view,” she said. “All windows.”
Jaquint said she wants people to understand that she teaches in a trauma-informed and behavior-informed way that emphasizes empowering kids and the people around them to do what is best for the student.
“I believe wholeheartedly that I was meant to be here,” she said. “The universe could not have possibly told me any louder and clearer where I was supposed to go.”