Having finished his administrative internship, Vitality Yanchuk returns to his classroom to continue teaching. Currently, Yanchuk teaches Global History and Geography, Participation in Government, and Practical Law. During the 2023-2024 school year, Yanchuk worked alongside several members of the district’s administrative team, including Gregory Lawson, María DeJesús, and David Nylen. As part of the job, he assisted in monitoring lunches and observing several teachers.
One of his favorite parts of the job was calculating and telling students that they got scholarships from New York State. Yanchuk says, “These are kids that are not in the office at all; these are seniors. It’s kind of to break that to them that hey, you’re eligible for a scholarship here from New York State because of your academic achievement over the last four years.”
During the second half of the school year, Yanchuk primarily stayed in the middle school and was able to be a supervisor for the eighth-grade trip to Darien Lake. Yanchuk mentions that before he started teaching at the high school, he was a student teacher for a different middle school. “I went into it with super fond memories of that age group.”
He notes that the experience working in administration is extremely different compared to working as a teacher. Administration runs on a looser schedule and they are talking and dealing with a larger group of students, whereas teachers tend to deal with the same group of students every other day and are based around a 6-period day.
Despite the differences, there are some lessons that he plans on using in the classroom. “As teachers, we work with parents. I think when I was doing the internship, I worked a lot more with parents so I became more comfortable with that,” Yanchuk states. “I wasn’t the type of teacher to always be reaching out to parents or to always be making those connections, but I think after the internship, I feel a lot more comfortable making that contact and involving parents more so in the process.”
The internship was one of several steps in his journey to becoming a long-term member of an administration team. The next step is to start applying for jobs that fit his requirements. “So I am applying for places, but I’m being very selective in terms of where I apply because I like what I do and it’s going to take quite a bit to get me to go elsewhere and to do something else,” Yanchuk says. “I have awesome colleagues and supportive administration here. So it’s a very difficult decision to make to leave what I have now and to move on to administration. But I’m keeping my options open. It’s super tough at this point to make that decision.”
