Judy Barcelon

Piner High’s Judy Barcelon was honored as the Sonoma County Career Technical Teacher of the Year for the last school year.

Barcelon’s award marks a double win for Piner because senior Tiffany Tran was honored as the 2010-11 Outstanding Career Technical Education Student of the Year in the medical field from the Sonoma County Office of Education last spring.

(To read about Tran, click here: http://bit.ly/mZ57cK)

Barcelon is credited by both Piner Principal Sally Bimrose and SCOE’s regional occupational program boss Stephen Jackson as a forward thinking teacher who has expanded the reach of Piner’s health occupations and health science investigations programs.

“The Health Investigations Career Pathway at Piner High School has blossomed over the past two years into one of the most popular and innovative health care programs in our county,” Jackson wrote to me in an email. “Barcelon has expanded this program’s outreach to the community by obtaining several job shadowing opportunities for her students with local health care facilities through grant funds and taken her students to compete in regional and state competitions with the student leadership organization Health Occupations Student Association.”

Bimrose described Barcelon as an “outstanding teacher.”

“Not only does she arrange internships for students in the third year of the Health Science Investigations Pathway and facilitate the Health Occupation Students of America organization on our campus, but she also participates in many opportunities for professional development to improve her own teaching knowledge and skills,” Bimrose wrote to me in an email.

“Last summer she was one of 20 teachers nationwide who attended the Genetics Science Learning Center at University of Utah,” Bimrose wrote. “There she participated in the development of national level curriculum in microbiology.”

ExtraCredit has featured Barcelon’s work with the CDC. To read about that, click here: http://bit.ly/qOTfQ7