Clinton Fetes Top Teacher

Andrew Baumgartner, a Georgia kindergarten teacher, will try just about anything to coax his kids to learn.

Baumgartner, who has held a wedding for Sleeping Beauty complete with limousine and cake, was honored by President Clinton Monday as the 1999 National Teacher of the Year.

"The role of teachers, while hard to exaggerate, unfortunately is too often easy to overlook," Mr. Clinton said at the White House ceremony in Baumgartner's honor. "The best way we can honor America's teachers is for the rest of us to give them the tools to succeed with our children in the 21st century," he added.

"Classes should be an adventure every day," said Baumgartner, who was teaching at A. Brian Merry Elementary School, in Augusta, Ga., when he went on leave last year to tour for his honor of 1998 Georgia Teacher of the Year. "They (classes) should be places where children discover ... where failure is kept at bay."

Baumgartner, 46, the first Georgia winner of the national contest, works at a 530-student school, where 58 percent of students get a free lunch, educators' most common measure of student poverty.

A teacher for 23 years, Baumgartner has battled his share of educational demons, even in his own family. He went through the pain of watching his son, diagnosed with multiple learning disabilities, fail in class and eventually drop out of school in frustration.

"He is one of the students who fell between the cracks," Baumgartner said in a recent interview. "When a school fails a child, it fails an entire family."

His son, now 21, got his general equivalency certificate and is enrolled in an Augusta technical school. The experience forced Baumgartner to re-evaluate his own teaching style: "It turned me into the teacher who became the teacher of the year. I had to dig down deep and figure out who I was."

Baumgartner, a former Marine who went on to earn a master's degree in early childhood education from North Georgia College, never thought the littlest kids would be too tough to handle.

"They have a real thirst for learning," he said. "They're still very eager to try."

He's also fought to overcome skepticism toward male teachers, especially ones in the early grades. More than three-fourths of the nation's teachers are women.

"The stereotype was they had to be motherly women, maternal," he said. "I had to show that I could be paternal, which is just as good or better since many of these kids don't have fathers at home."

"Little boys in school need to see men succeeding."

Baumgartner, originally from Savannah, Ga., was inspired to teach by his minister father. "We were taught that we'd been so blessed by God that it was our duty to give something back. I did that by having a career in service," he said.

He will spend a year on promotional tours as teacher of the year. The awaris sponsored by the Council of Chief State School Officers and Scholastic Inc., the educational publishers.

Baumgartner wants to use his tenure to emphasize that teachers and principals shouldn't be alone in setting high academic standards for schoolchildren

"Every one must be accountable for the public education system," he said. "That's why it's called the public education system."

Written by Anjetta McQueen