Sharp turn in career path leads to classroom, statewide award

Kristen Davenport talks with students in her eighth-grade science class at E.B. Frink Middle School while teacher intern Erika Desiderio, left, looks on. Davenport will be honored Friday as 2020 Outstanding Young Educator for North Carolina by NCASCD, a statewide association of teachers and administrators.

E.B. Frink Middle School science teacher Kristen Davenport will be honored Friday by a statewide association of teachers and administrators as the 2020 Outstanding Young Educator for North Carolina.

Davenport – a Lenoir County native, a product of Lenoir County Public Schools and a teacher in her fourth year – will receive the award from the North Carolina Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development at NCASCD’s annual state conference in Pinehurst.

The award is given annually to teachers with fewer than five years’ experience.

“It’s so meaningful and so thoughtful and it’s so humbling,” Davenport said recently. “I love my job and what I do, so getting to do it every day and getting awarded for it is crazy.”

But well deserved, says Dr. Amelia McLeod, LCPS’s director of middle school education.

“Ms. Davenport has played a crucial role at the district level, school level and classroom level to impact science education,” said Dr. McLeod, who nominated Davenport for the NCASCD award. “Her professional knowledge and skills transfer to high expectations for student achievement. We are fortunate to have Ms. Davenport supporting instruction in LCPS by working on curriculum, providing professional development and delivering engaging, rigorous instruction.”

Frink principal Elizabeth Pierce assessed her eighth-grade science teacher succinctly. “She’s spectacular. She sets high expectations and doesn’t take less than the best from her students.”

It wasn’t that many years ago, however, that Davenport saw her future as somewhere besides the classroom. She had graduated from North Lenoir High School and from Lenoir Community College and in 2014 headed to East Carolina University with plans to become a physical therapist, bringing with her a load of essential course work and associate degrees from LCC in science, biology and biology education.

“I love anatomy, physiology, the biology sciences. I took all those classes at LCC that you didn’t need to be a teacher because they were fun to me. They were a challenge and I loved the challenge,” she said. “I think that’s what’s made me a better teacher, having all these courses under my belt.”

She would have doubtless made a fine physical therapist, but just weeks at ECU told Davenport she needed to back up and start again. “The opportunity to help people, which is ultimately what I wanted to do, it just wasn’t the right area where I wanted to help, which I found out pretty quickly,” she said.

She remembers a chance encounter with Brent Williams, now LCPS superintendent but then her former principal at North Lenoir, as that nudge she needed to change course. Running into each other at a local restaurant, Williams advised Davenport to consider teaching as a career.

 “My identity in high school was sports. When you graduate high school and go to college, your identity is stripped. It was like, where do I go from here. It was very hard to find that, it really was. I was thinking PE but I needed a new me, something that would push me outside my comfort zone,” Davenport said.

She settled on science at N.C. State University and in May 2016 graduated cum laude with a bachelor of science degree in science education. The following fall, she entered the classroom at Frink to teach sixth and seventh grade science.

“I started (at N.C. State) with intentions to teach in high school, but my first clinical experience was not great. After that, I decided I wanted middle school,” Davenport said. “This is exactly where I want to be.”

Now fully involved in science education, Davenport is Frink’s science fair and Science Olympiad advisor, is a member of the district’s Science Curriculum Team and a member of the North Carolina Science Teachers Association. She is a teacher mentor at Frink and this semester is supervising a teacher intern from East Carolina University. She’s also served as Frink’s athletic director and girls basketball coach. In January, she was selected as a finalist for LCPS’s Teacher of the Year award for 2020-2021.

Yet to Pierce the best of what Davenport brings to the school and classroom – and to the teaching profession – is something else.

 “The word that always comes to my mind when I think of Kristen is ‘relationships.’ Her students seriously love her and love being in her class,” the principal said. “There is a mutual respect and a culture of caring that is not always found in classrooms. She has a special gift and ease of forming bonds with her students and they work hard because they know how much she cares about them. Students learn and grow in that environment.”

No accident there. Davenport still remembers her fifth-grade year at Northwest Elementary with teacher Felicia Solomon, now principal at Rochelle Middle School. That year stands out, she said, for how valued she felt, how she felt “loved and cherished” by her teacher.

“I think you see the relationships you can have every day,” Davenport said. “There can be amazing relationships in the classroom. For a student, feeling that you can get up and go to school every day and see your teacher is an amazing feeling. No matter what, your insecurities or whatever, are gone when you’re in that classroom.”