In Plainfield, our commitment to excellence in teaching is unwavering. We recruit top-tier educators, ensuring our students receive nothing short of the best education year after year. Rigorous criteria guarantees that the title of Plainfield Teacher of the Year is bestowed upon truly exceptional individuals. With two distinguished recipients, we take immense pride in their representation of Plainfield Schools.
Dayna Cade, 1st Grade teacher at Clarks Creek Elementary, is the district's Elementary representative. Ryann Mills, PHS Multilingual/Spanish teacher, is the district's Secondary representative.
Everyday is a new adventure in Mrs. Cade's room, where dressing for the day's theme is encouraged and curiosity is celebrated.
Mrs. Cade ensures that every day in her classroom is exciting, which she embodies with our Bringing Joy to Learning mission in mind. Known to have an outfit to match every day’s lesson, her students start to absorb that day’s curriculum from the moment they see her. She creates unique, engaging, and memorable experiences in her classroom daily, and has been doing so in Plainfield Schools for 24 years.
Mrs. Cade loves STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) and it weaves throughout all of her lessons. She combines STEM and Science of Reading in creative ways that ensures that her students are receiving the best possible education. She takes her STEM passion to the next level with her involvement with YAYSTEM!, a group of 3 Plainfield educators who want others to find the joy in teaching through STEM, and they share that joy with other teachers throughout Indiana through Keep Indiana Learning and various presentations.
Welcome! ¡Bienvenidos! Bienvenu! Akeyi! It’s not uncommon to hear all of these in Mrs. Ryann Mills’ classroom daily.
Mrs. Mills challenges her multilingual students to look critically to contextually learn as they are learning English. In addition to teaching Spanish I, she is currently the only ML (MultiLingual) teacher in PHS, teaching a Newcomers class (Levels I and II), an Advanced class (Levels II and III), and Resource classes. She has 90 students in her caseload that represent over 24 different countries and languages. More than one-third of this population PHS has been in the United States for 1 year or less and are labeled Newcomers with very limited English proficiency.
The Newcomers class is not only about learning the English language, but learning how to navigate life in America, and learning how–as a teenager–to transition into a new culture and future while leaving all that they have known and often family members behind. She is the connection that links these students to their new home, while also working to make sure that they are receiving the highest quality of education. As a lifelong Plainfield resident–and Class of 2002 graduate–is there anyone better to be the ‘welcoming committee’ to Plainfield?
During the summer, Mrs. Cade and Mrs. Mills will complete the comprehensive application for the Indiana Department of Education’s prestigious Teacher of the Year program. Those fortunate enough to have been taught by either of these educators would undoubtedly recognize them as excellent candidates for the state's most esteemed teaching award. We are so proud to have these two teachers at Plainfield!