Meet Utah's new Teacher of the Year: Northwest Middle's Sayre Posey 

• Connor Sanders
• Sayre Posey started her career in the Baltimore City Public Schools system.

Imagine you walk into class on a random morning, only to find yellow caution tape stretched across the door frame. The room is dark and eerie music pours from inside. Upon entering, you see the outline of a body on the floor.

No need to worry. You have not stumbled into an active police investigation. It's time to learn about the Boston Massacre in Sayre Posey's history class at Northwest Middle School.

Posey's out-of-the-box teaching methods and passion for the success of her students earned her the recognition of Utah's 2025 Teacher of the Year on September 5. She loves to role-play with her students (like dressing up as a judge for the Boston Massacre trial lessons) and prides herself on going the extra mile to ensure that they enjoy learning.

"The students feel so much more excited [during a dynamic activity] than a lesson where we're analyzing sources," Posey told City Weekly.

Nearly every inch of Posey's classroom is covered with photos she's taken with students and with the massive tri-folds they've made for the National History Day competition each year. She loves her job because every day she's "guaranteed" to get to laugh with her students, Posey said, but what's most special to her is seeing what her students go on to achieve once they've left her classroom.

"I love seeing my kids who were 14, and now they're 22, and they're student teaching, or they're in training in the police academy and telling me about all the court cases they're [studying]," Posey said. "And they're like, 'Oh, we learned about that in government. I remember.'"

During a speech at the Utah State Capitol when Posey received the award, she said she only wished her students could be there to celebrate with her.

Posey is the eighth teacher from Salt Lake City School District of the last 17 to win the award.

Baltimore to Utah

Posey's great-grandfather taught at a one-room schoolhouse in West Virginia's "coal country," she reported, starting a legacy of education among his descendants. Her mother taught kindergarten in Maryland and some of Posey's earliest memories are of "giant elementary school kids running at me" when she would visit her mom's class.

"[Teaching] has always just been in my blood and our genes," Posey said. "And my mom is definitely a big inspiration for me."

Posey graduated from the University of Maryland in 2016 and subsequently spent the next three years teaching at high schools in the Baltimore City Public Schools system (BCPS).

"When you have a depiction of an inner-city urban school, a lot of negative things typically come to people's minds," Posey noted. "And what I experienced in Baltimore was the most hardworking, passionate group of kiddos who were really, really impacted by poverty and gun violence, and it was their normal, everyday life."

Many of the schools in BCPS are kingertaren through eighth grade and face staffing challenges at the middle school level. Some of Posey's students would play hide-and-seek during class time because, she said, "there just weren't teachers."

This was a significant challenge for a young educator, but Posey did not get discouraged. Maryland requires students to take a standardized test in order to graduate high school, and the district's average pass rate in Posey's final year there was 35%.

Among Posey's students, however, 77% passed.

"[That] was probably my proudest moment as a teacher," Posey said.

Posey took an interest in rock climbing at a gym during her first year of teaching and had friends who had moved to Utah right out of college. She took a canyoneering trip with them in 2019 and fell in love with the natural beauty here. She went back to teach one more year in Maryland before landing a job at West Jordan High School.

Living History

Posey admits teaching at West Jordan was a "culture shock."

"I remember coming in on the first day of school with my Baltimore City teaching style, and I was like, 'I am going to scare the children if I act like this in the classroom,'" she said with a laugh.

She wanted to break a mentality that some students and teachers had fallen into after the COVID-19 pandemic—spending a 90-minute class period working on assignments in Canvas or other digital platforms—which pushed her to innovate on her lesson plans. Posey also taught Youth in Care at West Jordan, a program designed for students who live in a group home after being involved in the juvenile justice system.

Following that stop out west, Posey accepted the role she's in now—teaching history at Northwest Middle School in Salt Lake's Westpointe neighborhood. "I love it. It's so diverse," she said. "There's so many founts of knowledge that my students bring ... I feel like people don't realize how diverse communities in Utah are. Before I moved out here, I had no idea that there were schools that had 90% minority enrollment like Northwest."

Posey reports that most of the students at Northwest speak English as their second language and there are also many who are brand new to the U.S. after their families sought asylum here from countries like Afghanistan, Syria and Myanmar.

She rose to the challenge of the language barrier with a two-pronged attack: culturally relevant pedagogy and academic supports for multicultural learners. This approach means she focuses more on the indigenous perspective of American history.

"Culturally relevant pedagogy is the idea of students seeing themselves and learning about themselves and their history and their background within their curriculum," Posey explained.

In Posey's lessons on the Mexican-American War, she brings a tea set and name tags and asks the students to have small group "tea parties" where they embody the stakeholders of that time, from President James K. Polk to the indigenous people of California to the abolitionists.

Posey encourages students to create projects each year for the National History Day competition. One of the projects last year, from a student who is a member of the Northern Arapaho Tribe, focused on the effects of boarding schools on members of her nation and the Eastern Shoshone, who also live within the reservation on which she grew up in Wyoming.

On many occasions, Posey has stayed at school until 5, 6, even 7 p.m. to work on National History Day projects with her students.

When it comes to more practical support for English-learners, Posey focuses on being as adaptable as possible. She modifies assignments and uses ChatGPT to make readings more digestible for students at different levels of mastery.

For example, she might take an assignment that requires students to fill in the blank and add a word bank for students who are still getting the vocabulary down. She spends a lot of time working one-on-one with these students, which she enjoys.

"My kiddos who are brand new to the United States—I love their energy because so many of them are so excited and energetic to be in school in a different place," Posey said.

It helps, too, that many of Posey's students help their classmates with translations out of the goodness of their hearts.

"It's so cool when we're doing group reading, and I'll hear some of my students at a table talking to a kiddo who may not feel as confident speaking because they just moved here last year," Posey noted. "Hearing them say, 'You can read this. We're not gonna make fun of you. We'll read it all together,' is awesome."

Reaching New Heights

While Posey loves to put in the extra work to make her students succeed, she acknowledges that finding the right work/life balance is tricky for her, as it is for nearly all teachers.

Posey said she had spoken with Carly Maloney—her Teacher of the Year predecessor and an English and government teacher at Viewmont High School in Bountiful—who advocated for teachers to find a better balance, and it helped Posey come to terms with the need to make a bit more space for herself outside of work.

"I really struggle with overworking because I always get in the back of my mind, 'I need to change this' or 'this needs to be perfect' or 'I don't have these directions bolded'—and then it's like 9 p.m. on a Wednesday and I should have gone to bed 30 minutes ago," Posey said.

Educator Angela Watson's "40 Hour Teacher Workweek" program and other teacher self-care advocates online have helped Posey to move in the right direction, but ultimately she considers herself "lucky that I have a job that I care so much about."

While she doesn't climb as much as she once did, Posey is looking for opportunities to get back to it with her students. She was previously involved in a climbing program with Elevated Mountain Guides, where the apparel company Black Diamond donated shoes and other equipment for students to use at Westminster University's climbing wall.

Posey is hopeful to get a similar program back up and running. She reports that her students are always asking her about when they'll be able to climb. Even if it's just for a single session on the wall, Posey wants to challenge her students to reach new heights.

That's something she's done over and over again. Carrying forward her great-grandfather's legacy, Posey dedicates everything she has to seeing her students climb higher.

Nothing is better, she said in her award speech, than when she saw the eyes of one of her students, who was constantly late for class, light up because she told him she thought he would be a good teacher one day.

"I love this job so much and I care so much," Posey said. "When you care a lot and when you love it a lot, you always want to work more."

Posey says she's lucky to work in a job that she loves so much. More likely, Utah is lucky to have such an enthusiastic, dedicated, and loving person to call its Teacher of the Year. CW