In September 2022, Clackamas ESD honored Ron Antlitz, a special education teacher at Alder Creek Middle School in Milwaukie in the North Clackamas School District, as 2023 Regional Teacher of the Year. Months later, we invited Ron to a Clackamas ESD Board of Directors meeting, so we could learn more about his more than 27-year career serving middle and high school students with significant emotional and behavioral challenges. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Let’s go back to that afternoon in September when you learned you had been named Regional Teacher of the Year at an all-school assembly. You seemed surprised!

I honestly had no idea what the assembly was about until the district superintendent began to describe me. I was stunned. One of the things I would have done that day if I had known was prepared my students and had them come up with me to accept the award.

Teachers often don’t know in the moment whether they’re making a difference. A parent nominating you for the award gave a powerful testimonial about you. Do you feel like “Teacher of the Year” recognition validates your approach to teaching?

I’m grateful for and humbled by the award. Did it validate my teaching? The honest answer is no – the kids who I teach validate me. I’ve seen over the course of years students be incredibly successful in my program, and then go on to be successful in high school. I’ve been invited to a number of graduations. There are students in their 30s that I still am in contact with. And that’s the real validation. It’s about the kids, as much as I am honored and grateful for the award.

You have a mission very special to us at Clackamas ESD, because you support students who are dealing with a lot of extra challenges. How did you find your way to this work? You didn’t take a traditional path.

Teaching was a midlife career change for me. I was in my early 30s, and I had run group homes. The last set of group homes I ran were for kids who had been in trouble with the juvenile justice system. It was very hard and frustrating work. To this day I don’t know if I had success. When I did some self-searching, I realized that I need to get to these kids earlier. I noticed that all of the kids I worked with were in some form of special education addressing their behavioral need. And I thought, that’s what I need to do. I got a master’s in education, and devoted myself to learning how to work with kids with behavioral and emotional problems.

Tell us more about the program you developed and lead at Alder Creek – the Transitional Learning Center.

I love the program. We try and balance two things. We have a highly structured environment, because kids who have been through trauma and have emotional and behavioral disability really need consistency. They need to be able to come in and predict what’s going to happen each moment of each day. While I bring a lot of creativity to individual lessons, there’s a pattern to each and every class that never varies. There’s a warm-up. Then we do some type of energizer. Then we do a mindfulness activity, which calms them for the lesson, and also teaches them skills to help them deal with the trauma all of them are bringing into the classroom. Then we have our lesson, and then we have closure. So there’s that consistency. We have a point system that gives them immediate feedback on how they are doing in engaging in school that day. At the end of the day, I communicate that same feedback to their parents. So many of these parents have negative experiences with the schools. They are getting communication from me each and every day – primarily good. So it starts to mend that relationship with the families and the school.

We also focus on building community in the classroom. The first two weeks of school we totally focus on “we are a community” and what that means. Then when we fully introduce academics, we talk about what it means to be a community doing different work. I teach a class in how to be a community, and also how to manage and regulate our behaviors. We reinforce those important skills of being in community together throughout the school year.

The day you were announced as Teacher of the Year you were wearing a T-shirt with a rainbow and the slogan “Be You,” which seems to represent your philosophy as a teacher. It’s clear you’ve been able to build strong, long-term relationships with students. They trust you. What’s your secret?

I don’t know if there’s a secret. I wore that shirt that day for a student in an attempt to build community. Every year there is a student who has experienced bullying around gender identification –some severe bullying, where they weren’t going to trust anybody. So I was trying in every way possible – including how I dress, especially on Fridays where it’s a little less formal – to really validate who they are as a person, and draw them into the community and make them feel safe.

And it worked. About a month after I got the award, we were reading “The Book of Misfits” in language arts class. One of the characters is a gay young man in middle school who actually comes out in the book. And the student got really teary, and started talking about what it was like for them to come out. And before I know it, and without my prompting, students pulled their desks in a way that formed a circle. And it was so supportive, and it was so safe for that student to go a little deeper and talk about some of the trauma that they experienced when they came out, and to talk about what that’s like. And one by one, the students did a wonderful job of relating to the student and offering support in helping them heal in this community. It was one of those moments that I’ll treasure for the rest of my life.

Your respect for your students is so evident in everything you do. How can we establish that kind of respect and expectation of trust in all classrooms?

Some of my colleagues have as many as 250 students. And to build trust and to have a deep relationship where somebody feels like they can open up about the worst things that have ever happened to them, when they’re one of 250 students, that’s an impossible barrier. We need more money so we can have smaller classrooms, so that the class size is more like 20 than 30, and so the teacher who has 250 students has more like 120 students, which is still a staggering number. But it’s staggered over time. Then you build community, routines, structure in the classroom in the first few weeks of the year. If you establish those things, students are going to take off.

Teachers also need to be afforded opportunities to deal with one student at a time when issues come up. I have 14 students this year. It still takes a lot of work and it’s still hard. You work 12-hour days and some on weekends to be able to do it. But once your class size and load of students reaches a certain limit, it is almost impossible.

What else would you like people to know about your students, your team and the work you do?

It’s the hardest job that you’ll ever love, and many of the connections that I get to build with these students are going to last a lifetime. I don’t devalue or underestimate what I do. But the people who actually face their traumas, go through the fears, go through walls that get built up, and then do the work to catch up in their education and trust me long enough to do that – those are the students. And they deserve an award more than I do. They have done such incredibly hard work. These kids are so smart, but trauma has made learning so difficult for them. Once that trauma starts to heal, reading levels increase by three years in a single year, and math levels do the same thing. You just need to get out of the way.

I’m the luckiest man in the world. I’m humbled when I look at the teachers at Alder Creek Middle School that I would be chosen for the award. I have worked throughout my career with an incredible staff, but the two paraprofessionals I work with now are the two most amazing people I have ever worked with. I can’t tell you the hours they go above and beyond the call of duty.

I’m so grateful to be part of this ESD, and part of the North Clackamas School District. There are a lot of places, even some in Oregon, where I would be fired for things that I say and do in the classroom, like the discussion I shared about a student coming out, and what I did in that moment. But that moment made a life-changing difference in this one child. They’re 12 years old. So I’m so grateful to be here where I can do what I do and these students can benefit from it.