By Mia Randall, Editor in Chief and Emme Hogge Associate Editor
This morning, Eagle Polytechnic Institute (EPI) and Metal Tech Teacher Ryan Tompkins was awarded with ABC10’s Teacher of the Month Award.
The Teacher of the Month Award is given to exceptional teachers in the Sacramento area, and they can be nominated by parents, other teachers and principals by filling out a google form online. Sacramento State and the Sacramento County Office of Education chooses which teacher will be presented with the award from the teachers that are nominated. Each Teacher of the Month is presented with $1,000 each, and is a nominee for Teacher of the Year, who receives $5,000 in prize money.
Principal Evelyn Welborn explained how Tompkins has excelled as a teacher.
“He just has an overall dedication to this program and the kids love him—the people who are in this program really find their home here and they’re really dedicated to being a part of this group—it just becomes a family on campus,” Welborn said.
Father of Caleb Green (‘25), Joe Green, also believes that Tompkins has made an exceptional impact on students’ lives, especially his son’s.
“If [Caleb] could take a class from him every semester, he would—he’d be in here every day, all the time if he could,” Green said. “He absolutely loves it and they do some amazing projects.”
Along with being a teacher at El Camino, Tompkins was also an EC student and frequently spent his time in the same classroom that he now teaches in.
“It’s most of the reason why I put in the extra effort a lot of the time—halfway through my senior year that’s when I decided that that was the direction I wanted to take,” Tompkins said.
He says he owes a lot of his teaching skills and personality to the teachers he had growing up.
“In terms of classroom personality and management, I look to Mr. Waldo a lot because he was a beginning teacher when I was a student here and one of my favorites—you try to pull from the best of the best,” Tompkins added.
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