2009 Award Winners

Dayna Darby
Talcott Fine Arts and Museum Academy, Chicago
Preschool for All

When her group of precocious first graders began to ask questions about the garbage in the cafeteria – Where does it go? Why is there so much? Why don’t we recycle? – Dayna Darby brought it into the classroom and let them dig in. Choosing to teach by letting her students take the lead, Dayna watched as her young students sparked a reduce/reuse/recycle campaign that spread through the whole school. “I believe that children hold the key to learning; my job is to help them find the correct door to place the key,” she explains, and this particular door opened onto school-wide awareness about the lack of a cogent recycling program in Chicago. Left to their own curiosity, her first graders discovered that even adults hadn’t figured out how to recycle effectively at Talcott. An inspiring leader, even from the sidelines, Dayna helped her young students learn that they could challenge the limitations of their own role models. Craig Benes, Talcott Academy principal, beams at the mention of this accomplishment: “I respect less what people say, and more what they do. What Dayna does has inspired our whole school.”