Character, Courage, Community: Kelsey Stoyanova is a rising star

This story originally appeared in Maine Alumni Magazine, a publication of the University of Maine Alumni Association. To read it on their website, click here.

It’s after the last bell at Bangor High School on a Friday afternoon and most of the students have gone home for the weekend. Kelsey Stoyanova is sitting in her classroom when a teenage boy enters.

“For you,” he says, handing her a card for Teacher Appreciation Week.

Stoyanova stands up to give the boy a hug.

“Thank you so much,” she says. “That means a lot.”

After they wish each other a good weekend and the boy leaves, Stoyanova reads aloud from the card: “You make my days better with your positivity and happiness. Thank you for bringing great topics to class and making them interesting. People don’t usually ask how you are doing in the morning, but you do which shows you care about us. So thank you so, so, so much.”

“This is it,” she says. “This is what it’s all about.”

Spend time in Stoyanova’s classroom and you’ll witness some of the qualities that the student mentioned in his card: Positivity, happiness, care, and, of course, a knack for making learning interesting and fun. All of these attributes and more helped make her the 2022 Maine Teacher of the Year. They’re also among the reasons that she was named this year’s Rising Star Award recipient from the University of Maine Alumni Association.

Character

A few hours earlier, Stoyanova is in her element, teaching to a classroom full of first-year high school students who have been reading Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” for the past few weeks. However, today she’s leading them through a lesson on embodying a character in their choice books, which as the name implies are books they have chosen to read as opposed to being assigned.

“What lessons can we learn from the characters in the books we’re reading?” Stoyanova asks her students to consider.

She leads them through a series of exercises designed to get at the heart of that question. First, the students sit at their desks quietly writing down answers to questions about their characters. Later, they stand up and talk to each other in the roles of their characters for five minutes before returning to their desks. They spend a couple of minutes writing words that define their characters on one side of a note card and an inspirational quote reminiscent of their characters on the other side. The students then talk to each other about why they picked their quotes. The note cards with the quotes on them will be decorated and posted on a bulletin board in Stoyanova’s classroom for the rest of the year, inspiring them to finish the year strong.

After all the students have left, I ask Stoyanova to reflect on what she hoped they had taken from the class.

“When you show kids that authors write books to teach us lessons, and then you ask them to think about what a character learned from something that happened in the book, they start to recognize, ‘Oh, this is for more than just my entertainment,’” she says. “And hopefully they can apply that to other situations, like recognizing that different people go through different things, and ‘How can I be an empathetic citizen? How can I learn from other people’s experiences to make the world a place where everybody gets to thrive?’”

It’s important, Stoyanova adds, that the lesson used the students’ choice books.

“My goal as an educator is to help students see themselves in the places and spaces that they want to be,” says Stoyanova. “Part of that is giving them a choice and a voice. That’s why I have them talk to each other as their characters, so they’re passing the lessons along.”

“The idea,” she says, “is that they are all productive citizens within the classroom, and they can apply that same knowledge to being a productive citizen in their community, whatever that community looks like — whether it’s a sports team, or a job, or when they graduate and are out on their own. How can we share knowledge and grow and learn together? That’s why choice is so important.”

Courage

Last year was something of a homecoming for Stoyanova, who graduated from Bangor High in 2010. Her first and only other teaching job after graduating from UMaine in 2014 with a degree in secondary education was at Reeds Brook Middle School in Hampden, where she was for nearly a decade.

“What I love about high school,” she says, “is that you have these really resilient kids who are finding their place in the world, unapologetically, and they’ve invited you along for the ride.”

It’s no secret that being a teacher in this day and age is not an easy task. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated preexisting challenges facing K–12 schools and those who work in education, causing many veteran teachers to retire or pursue other career opportunities. Nationwide, the past two decades have seen fewer young people choose careers in the classroom, contributing to teacher shortages that many observers have likened to a crisis.

Despite all of this, Stoyanova has remained steadfast in her commitment to the profession. Being Maine Teacher of the Year gave her something of a platform to advocate for her fellow educators, a role she admits took some adjusting to.

“When you are named Maine Teacher of the Year, at first you feel a little imposter syndrome,” she says. “There are so many amazing educators. How did it become you? And then you recognize that your role is not to celebrate what you’re doing, but to champion and share what your students are doing and what other teachers are doing.”

In addition to teacher shortages, one of the major challenges facing K-12 schools right now is criticism from people outside the profession about what it means to be a teacher and the best ways to educate students. In part because she’s in the public eye so much, Stoyanova has been personally subjected to such commentary that all teachers face on some level.

“There are some people who would put teachers into a box,” she says. “I would say those people don’t understand how kids grow and develop as human beings. Yes, I am here to teach my students to read and write and I will do that. But I will also teach them to be compassionate humans and find their place in the world.”

Emilie Throckmorton has known Stoyanova since she was a teenager. When they met, Throckmorton, who’s also in the English Language Arts department at Bangor High School, was Stoyanova’s freshman English teacher. Later, Stoyanova was teaching at Reeds Brook when Throckmorton’s two children were students there.

“She is an incredibly gifted teacher,” Throckmorton says. “She’s really natural with kids, which is sort of the unteachable part of it. But she works really, really hard at her craft.”

As their relationship has grown from teacher-student to parent-teacher to colleagues, Throckmorton says she’s watched in admiration as Stoyanova has received accolades for her work. She says the impressive thing is how humble Stoyanova has remained.

“She’s won all these awards, but it’s not like she carries it around,” she says. “She’s constantly working to become a better teacher; she lifts up other people all the time and is open to new ideas.”

In terms of the adversity that Stoyanova has faced from being the public face of educators and education in Maine, Throckmorton has one word to describe her response: “brave.”

“Some of the things that she’s had to deal with, nobody would blame her if she hid in her classroom and tried not to bring attention to herself,” Throckmorton says. “But she just has this courage and confidence that she’s right and that it’s worth it to keep advocating for her colleagues and for kids.”

Recently, Throckmorton was named the 2024 Penobscot County Teacher of the Year. The person who nominated her: Stoyanova.

Professor Emeritus of Literacy Education Richard Kent worked with Stoyanova and Throckmorton, who both earned certificates from the Maine Writing Project, a long-running professional development program for teachers at UMaine. Kent also taught Stoyanova as an undergraduate and a master’s student.

“We’ve had some shining stars at UMaine, and it’s just a pleasure to be associated with Kelsey and Emilie and watch them support each other,” says Kent, who was Maine Teacher of the Year in 1993 before becoming a faculty member at UMaine’s College of Education and Human Development.

“Having been Maine Teacher of the Year, I know the pressure that comes with the job. You’re representing not just yourself, but educators across the state,” Kent says. “It takes a special person, and Kelsey has done it beautifully. It’s so exciting to watch, because she inspires everyone around her to want to do more.”

Community

In April, when she accepted the UMaine Alumni Association’s 2024 Rising Star Award at the annual Alumni Achievement Awards ceremony, Stoyanova gave a heartfelt speech in which she began by saying, “I am continuously humbled by the tremendous community that I have alongside me.”

“I specifically say alongside me and not behind me,” she added, “not because they wouldn’t stand behind me should I need them to, but because the only way to forge a path forward is to first stand side by side with those you trust with your ideas, your vision, your values, and your mission.”

The University of Maine has been a big part of Stoyanova’s community for the past 15 or so years. In addition to her bachelor’s degree in secondary education, she earned a Master of Education in literacy education in 2018, and most recently an Education Specialist (Ed.S.) degree in educational leadership in 2023.

“I’ve been through UMaine as a student three different times now, so it’s been a big part of empowering me as an educator,” Stoyanova says.

She became Maine Teacher of the Year while she was working on her Ed.S. degree, and says both experiences gave her the opportunity to connect with colleagues from around the state. Some of the other students in the educational leadership program were interested in moving from teaching to positions as building principals or district-level administrators in K-12 schools. But Stoyanova says her goal, at least for now, is to be a leader while remaining in the classroom.

“One of my biggest goals is to create pathways for teachers to lead in ways that go beyond the classroom walls,” she says.

The Rising Star Award is one of two early-career awards presented by the Alumni Association each year.

As she closed her speech at the alumni awards ceremony, Stoyanova talked about how she will rely on her community as she pursues her future goals and continues to advocate for teachers and kids. She likened her journey to that of Miss Rumphius, the title character of the children’s book by the late Maine author Barbara Cooney. In the book, which Stoyanova said is a favorite of her young son, when Miss Rumphius is a little girl named Alice, she tells her grandfather how she dreams of visiting faraway places before settling down to live by the sea. The grandfather tells her that these are good plans, but that she “must do something to make the world more beautiful” as well. After Alice grows up, travels the world, and moves to a place by the sea, she still wonders how she can accomplish the last thing her grandfather told her she must do. Then one day she notices the lupines outside her bedroom window and along the cliffs near her house, and it comes to her. She orders lupine seeds from catalogs and begins sowing them all over town with the help of the prevailing winds. The next spring, when the colorful lupines are in bloom she realizes that she’s done it: She’s made the world more beautiful.

“With every opportunity, every story, every seed, I can only hope that I am doing just that,” Stoyanova told the crowd at the Alumni Achievement Awards.

“But know that it is only possible with all of you, the traveling winds, that I can,” she said.

Contact: Casey Kelly, casey.kelly@maine.edu.