Henrico's Top Teachers – Katie Cooke, Academy at Virginia Randolph (PACE program), English

Famed Henrico educator Virginia Randolph influenced thousands of teachers and students with her teaching philosophy, which was centered around a belief that it is critical to teach the whole student – not just an academic subject.

For Katie Cooke, who teaches at the Glen Allen school named for Randolph, that approach couldn't be more fitting.

“I feel we need to meet their basic needs before we can educate them,” said Cooke, an English teacher in the PACE program at The Academy at Virginia Randolph. “I’ve always kind of embraced that philosophy. I go into work every day happy to be there with a smile on my face, because I know that I’m helping a group of kids just make their day better. I’m helping a group of kids kind of form a different relationship with school. School can be a place where they feel safe and trusted.

“In my heart, I kind of think that I was one of those people who was born to teach.”

After graduating from Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Cooke accepted a job offer to teach at Newbridge Learning Center in Eastern Henrico, which at the time was one of the county's two alternative middle schools. She had no formal training in working with students who needed alternative educational paths but quickly came to appreciate the chance she had to help get them back on track.

Teaching jobs in Hanover and Maryland followed, along with a brief hiatus when Cooke and her ex-husband had their two sons, before she moved back to Henrico and took a job at Virginia Randolph as part of the PACE Program.

The program allows teens, even as they take on-grade courses in certain subjects, to recover credits they failed to obtain during a previous grade. For example, some of her students take ninth-grade courses in some subjects while they take eighth-grade English with her.

“I’m just really proud of the program, what we do, and our kids,” she said. “I don’t like to view it as second chance program because I think the second chance is more on us as teachers. It's more of an opportunity for us as teachers to kind of fix the things that haven’t worked for those students in the past educationally and to really find the best learning style for those students and get them to ninth grade.”

Cooke works hard to engage her students, through music, movies and other interests they have.

“I have to try to come up with creative ways that are going to draw them in,” she said. “We get to, in smaller classes, work individually with students and figure out what works for our students and kind of make school a place that they enjoy again.”

For Cooke, a self-described “school nerd” when she was a student, the opportunity to help her own students feel excited about school is what keeps her energized every day.

“I get to form those relationships with kids that make them want to come to school,” she said.

She starts by allowing them the chance to have a fresh start at Randolph.

Although she receives a file on each student, detailing his or her backgrounds and challenges and in some cases behavorial issues, Cooke tells them on the first day of school that she won't look at those files. She wants her students to feel the freedom to become the versions of themselves that they want to be – not the versions they've been elsewhere.

“It’s a fresh new start at PACE," she said, “because they can be anybody they want to at PACE. At that age, they’ve become 'that student' in their classroom and for a lot of them. . . anytime they walk in the classroom, a teacher has been warned about them. It could be about their attendance [ or something else]. A lot of times kids will put up a barrier because of that and they will act to their reputation. If I say 'This is a fresh start, you are to me these beautiful perfect angels that I want here,' they will rise to that and they will be these sweet, perfect kids.

“That’s the side they show me. They rise to that kind of expectation. I just want them to be what they want to be seen as.”

Cooke's ability to be real with her students quickly becomes evident to them.

“She has always been there for me through rough times when I never knew who to go to,” one former student wrote in a nomination. “She's always willing to help others even when she has her own stuff going on, not to mention she always accepts people for who they are. She is an open minded, lovely lady. She's wonderful at her job of being a teacher.”

"She's impacted me on just being there and supporting me like my mother has always done for me," a nominator wrote. “When I'm at school and have an issue she will, willingly listen to me and help my current issue.”

Teaching at Virginia Randolph has given Cooke an even greater sense of awe of the famed educator.

“I’ve always been inspired by her, but then learning so much more about her made me so much prouder to teach here,” Cooke said, recounting how Randolph frequently would pick up her students at their homes and bring them to school, or house many of them herself.

“I really truly feel that working at that school is probably the best fit for me, knowing that it has her name,” Cooke said. “I think a lot of us are trying to kind of keep that legacy alive. She was a phenomenal human being and I feel honored to work at a school named for her.”

For Cooke, it's important that the community at large begins to view The Academy at Virginia Randolph as "just another school" rather than as one where students go when they are troubled.

“Alternative education is just for students who haven’t succeeded in traditional learning environment, for any number of reasons,” she said. “They’re children. Moving in the direction where we see Virginia Randolph, the school, in a different light, is something I would just love to see.”