2001 Texas Teacher of the Year
Ms. DeMino is a teacher at Howard Early Childhood Center in San Antonio, Texas. She has been teaching Preschool Program for Children with Disabilities for twenty-three years.

What are your beliefs about teaching?
"I believe that teaching is not just about facts, it's about demonstrating the ability to help children cultivate self-confidence, self-respect and tolerance. Children need to be guided through this process."

How are your beliefs incorporated in your teaching style?
"I help the children I teach to value success internally and not just for what it will help them gain for someone else. Learning can be fun but sometimes it takes hard work and determination. Students need help realizing that failure is a good thing if you learn from your mistakes; that failure makes successes better and can help them strive to do better if they choose to persevere."

What is your greatest teaching accomplishment?
"My greatest teaching accomplishment has been helping parents get beyond unnecessary guilt and onto a path where they feel comfortable and see the necessary expectations of their child with a disability. Then, seeing the child rise to the occasion."

What's the most critical issue facing educators today and what do you think can be done to resolve this issue?
"The school system is not solely responsible for shaping our children into literate and productive adults. This charge should be placed in the hands of both the schools and the parents. As a nation, we need to focus on the kind of literate individuals we want to help develop and we need to put our money where our mouths are. We need to decide just how important education is. Good teachers must be respected and compensated well so that the teaching profession is as attractive as any other. Class sizes need to be lowered, and the tools of our trade, necessary materials and productive professional development should be made available to teachers and not just provided if money allows."

Inspirational thought:
"Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: 'To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others: to leave the world a bit better…to know even one life has breathed a bit easier because you have lived. That is to have succeeded.' We, as teachers, have the ability to touch so many and although salary issues need to be addressed for our profession, nothing nourishes my soul more than the feeling I get when I have helped a child or her family catch sight of a brighter tomorrow."