Her Story
Judy L. Haller earned her B.A. in English/Speech from Marshall University in 1964 and began teaching that year in the Chesapeake Exempted Schools, followed by Fairborn City Schools in Ohio. In 1970 she joined Dayton City Schools, where — after time out for raising her children — she built a 26-year career teaching junior and senior high English, specializing for the last decade of it in high-risk inner-city students. At the time of her nomination she taught at the Greene JROTC Academy, having previously spent years at Fairport and MacFarlane Middle Schools.
In 1988 Haller founded Turn Around for Successful Citizenship (T.A.S.C.), a dropout prevention program for middle school students who had already been written off by the system as “percentage of loss.” Since she couldn’t get the district funding to do what she believed her students needed, she began pursuing grants on her own — over the course of six years bringing in roughly $75,000 to fund computers, software, and hands-on projects for her classroom, including two National Foundation for the Improvement of Education/NIKE “Just Do It” grants.
Her honors reflected a career built on innovation: the Walt Disney Company’s American Teacher Award, IBM Ohio and Regional Teacher of the Year, the “Professional Best” award from Learning magazine and Oldsmobile, Outstanding Professional from the National Organization of Student Assistance and Partnerships, a Jennings Scholar award from the Martha Holden Jennings Foundation, Dayton Teacher of the Year, and a nomination as one of President Bush’s “Points of Light.” By 1994 she was also a member of Discovery Communications’ national VCR Team, conducting 20 workshops that year alone and reaching nearly 1,000 educators nationwide in the use of television as a teaching tool.
Beyond the Classroom
Haller’s students became known across Dayton for turning classroom lessons into public action. When 100-year-old cedar shingles were torn off the historic Wright Cycle Shop and thrown in a dumpster during its restoration, Haller and her students retrieved them, cleaned each by hand, and marketed them worldwide after a feature in NEA Today — raising $7,000 that was donated back to the restoration project. When her students noticed a prostitution problem around their school building, their letter-writing campaign drew enough attention that the city of Dayton finally cleaned up the neighborhood; a similar campaign got demeaning t-shirts pulled from a local mall.
After a public-housing riot followed a drug bust by Dayton police, Haller’s students developed “Project Blue,” writing letters of support to the newspaper, making blue ribbons for the community, and hosting a “Blue Brunch” where police, the mayor, city commissioners, and the school board heard directly from students about how much they valued law enforcement. When a puppy was found half-skinned alive on the local Humane Society’s doorstep, her class raised money for its care and began working to strengthen Ohio’s animal cruelty laws. Every year Haller found a cause to “capture the hearts and imaginations” of her students — writing over 200 letters to convince Grammy winner Lee Greenwood to come sing “God Bless the U.S.A.” in person for her class, and organizing an elaborate “Patriotism on Parade” assembly that brought in representatives from every branch of the military, elected officials, and former POWs.
She also volunteered at a senior citizens’ center, served in public office for eight years, spearheaded a fundraising drive for a heart/lung transplant, and organized celebrity donations for the Special Wish Foundation auction. In her final years before the nomination, she secured funding to send 35 students — for 99% of them, their first-ever flight — on a day trip to Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium, and won a grant to bring “Baby Think It Over” computerized dolls into her classroom to give students a realistic experience of the responsibilities of parenthood.
Philosophy Into Action
Haller traced her calling back to age seven, when she sat other children down in her own makeshift “classroom” to teach them, and to a high school English teacher, the strict and demanding “Miss Keeney,” whose insistence on perfection first inspired her toward the profession. Over time she said she left Miss Keeney’s philosophy of perfection behind and built her own: students in her room didn’t all have to excel in English, but they had to excel in something. She believed a student’s success in her subject was inseparable from feeling like they mattered — that community involvement and public recognition built the self-esteem that then made real academic progress possible.
Her classroom looked less like a traditional room and more like a home — furnished through small grants with comfortable chairs, couches, lamps, a refrigerator, and a simmering pot of potpourri. She filled it with humor: a broom parked in the corner as her “transportation,” a cage housing a stuffed “endangered species” (a whale), and a hand and wig sticking out of a trash can representing the last student who didn’t listen. She believed patience and humor were her most valuable tools for defusing the tension her high-risk students often carried, and that every child deserved someone who would personally know them — and their parents — and treat their success as something that mattered deeply.
“Teaching is not what I do…a teacher is what I am.”— quoted in her essay, “Philosophy of Teaching” (from her remarks on receiving the Walt Disney American Teacher Award)
In Her Own Words
“My students are extremely difficult. Many have been in high school for three years and have no credit, and, in many cases, if they weren’t faced with prison time if they dropped out, they wouldn’t be with me at all! I have to find something for them to grab on to… I have to find something that will give them hope… And each time I lose one, the hurt is as deep and as wounding as it was the first time I failed with a child.”— from her essay, “Philosophy of Teaching”
“I don’t always succeed, but I always try with every ounce I have to give, and I will continue to do so for as long as I am able. I can’t imagine life without teaching, and when I retire, I’ll be back there as the best volunteer Dayton City Schools ever had!”— from her essay, “In the Classroom”
“By the age I receive them (15–17), they are rapidly approaching their last hope for change, and I will do everything within my power to open the door so that life, for each of them, will be as rewarding as it has been for me.”— from her essay, “Professional Biography”
What Others Said
“Mrs. Haller has the expertise in training and facilitation of Leadership/Organizational Development. She has exhibited the kind of character and endurance that is essential in her position… She is the model of confidence and competence in her classroom, as well as in her interaction with colleagues and parents.”— Learwinson Jackson, Principal, Greene JROTC Academy and Nominator
“Judy’s ability to communicate and inspire students is reflected in her students’ substantial increases on the California Achievement Tests, and the many return visits of former students to see her each year… Judy is inspiring to her colleagues and is tireless with her assistance. Her evenings, weekends and summers are filled with thinking of others.”— Iris F. Carter, Teacher, Fairport Middle School
“Her level of performance is the highest of any teacher I have ever observed. She is constantly tuned in to her students, her school, and our community… This man who sang at the White House sang to a group of middle school students in Dayton, Ohio, because this teacher never gives up!”— Clarence Wade, Former Principal, MacFarlane and Fairport Middle Schools
“Mrs. Haller is not your traditional teacher, and that’s what makes her efforts more appealing. Her combination of innovation and the ability to take risks, when others would choose to give up, is the recipe for a stimulating and fun learning experience.”— Jalma L. Fields, State and Federal Education Programs, Dayton Public Schools
“Judy’s creativity is evident from computer programs, to rabbits, to schoolground arboretum… I would say, then, that my description of Judy Haller includes the hallmarks of professional generosity, unbounded enthusiasm, shared humor, powerful tenacity, and intense creativity.”— V. Frances West, Teacher, Stivers Middle School