LifeChanger of the Year Nominee Profile

Clare Adams was nominated by her colleague, Tisha Piwetz.

Mrs. Adams has dedicated her professional life to students. As the child of an educator, Mrs. Adams saw with her own eyes the impact of a teacher on a young life. 

Mrs. Adams teaches students to be responsible for their actions and work. She holds students accountable and is very good at staying on top of them until their tasks are completed to their best ability. Her love of learning and how much she values education comes across to each of her students in her dedication to teaching. Students, parents, and fellow teachers can see by her commitment that school is important to their future success. In order to structure her students for optimal achievement, she uses data to inform her whole class instruction, as well as individual instruction.  Her students’ performance often proves she's very successful in her teaching.

Three days after school started in 2017, Hurricane Harvey decimated the town of Port Aransas, where Mrs. Adams teaches. All school buildings suffered extensive damage and were closed. The majority of homes were destroyed. Six weeks later, portable classrooms were brought in, and students returned to school. During this time, Mrs. Adams connected with one of her high school classmates who was teaching design at their alma mater. Her friend asked how her students might help in the recovery efforts.  Mrs. Adams invited the design students to come out to Port Aransas, where they assisted her in transforming the dreary, empty portable classroom into a rich learning environment for her students, who had all experienced trauma in the aftermath of the hurricane.

Mrs. Adams has been a longstanding leader on the district’s vertical teams.  She was such a strong leader that her colleagues wished she could serve on every team that represented a core subject area. Throughout her career, she nearly did that, having served on ELAR, social studies, and mathematics vertical teams throughout her tenure. 

When Mrs. Adams attended summer conferences like CSCOPE in San Antonio, TX and iPad-Palooza at Eanes ISD, she would immediately begin planning how to share her newfound teaching strategies with her fellow colleagues at upcoming district in-service trainings. 

At a professional level, Mrs. Adams has always been willing to step up when the region was looking for assistance from area teachers to help develop and roll out new curriculum or provide feedback on the updating of the TEKS.  One summer, she shared her highly effective ELA instructional methods to fellow teachers from across Region 2.  She loves learning and sharing what she learns.

Mrs. Adams does not give up; she looks for a way to make it work.  At one of the summer conferences she attended, she heard about the benefits of standup desks in the classroom.  She researched to learn more about the positive impact these desks would have for her fifth grade students. She approached a few funding sources until she found the funds needed to provide standup desks for each student in the two 5th grade classrooms.  Before you knew it, many of the other grade levels were requesting standup desks for their classrooms.

For the past twenty years, Mrs. Adams established an environment allowing her students to converse with their peers and work through tasks using higher-level thinking skills. Many of her former students return from college thanking her for always expecting them to do their best, as it helped shape the lifelong learners they have become.

"As a teacher, Clare Adams is a role model for her students, parents and community members. Some would even say she is a LifeChanger," said Piwetz.