After two decades in the restaurant industry, Amanda Burns wasn’t sure where her next chapter would take her, until a leap of faith and a new nonprofit program helped her trade hospitality for a classroom.
Burns spent 20 years in the restaurant business.
“My degree is in hospitality management. I worked with Shake Shack for six years and other restaurants before that. My career until recently was specifically in restaurant management,” Burns said.
She decided to leave the business and go into nonprofit work, but felt pulled to work with kids. That’s when someone told her about the nonprofit Achieve Miami and its Teacher Accelerator Program or TAP.
A leap of faith into education
“It’s scary to take a leap of faith like that. So, for me, the biggest thing was the support system that I got out of TAP. I came out of that with an education base with colleagues,” Burns said. “They helped me develop my own confidence…”
Burns is now in her second year of teaching. She has taught math, science and special education classes. She made such a big impression that she was named Rookie Teacher of the Year at Palmetto Middle School.
Answering the teacher shortage
“We wanted smart people, passionate people, people who cared about what they did but they might not have known exactly how to become teachers,” said Leslie Miller Saiontz, who founded Achieve Miami ten years ago. TAP launched in 2023. “The Teacher Accelerator Program really came to being as a response of the major, major teacher crisis that we are feeling across the country.”
“We found ourselves immersed in so many of our communities and noticing that we have schools where there were so many classrooms without a teacher,” Miller Saiontz said.
In the past two years, TAP has placed around 200 teachers in local schools. Another 200 are expected to join the teaching ranks in the fall. Trainees take a one-semester undergraduate education course, followed by a summer internship, before landing a full-time teaching job.
Making a difference in the classroom
Burns said watching her students grasp what she’s teaching is why she’s in the classroom.
“That’s why I’m here, every day. I’m here because those moments when you see the ‘click,’ that’s the moment. That’s why I love what I do.”
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