Teachers, We Salute You!

Bookshare thanks and salutes teachers during Teacher Appreciation Week

You have chosen one of the most important careers in our society: educating our youth. Yet you do not receive the recognition you deserve.

Every day you show up at school ready to support students with a wide variety of needs and challenges. You also contend with a myriad of school, district, state, and federal policies; parental demands; funding and resource shortages; ever-changing learning standards; and a revolving door of tools that you are expected to master and implement. Through skill and resolve, you navigate these demands and impart critical information to students, enriching their understanding of the world, and even making them smile, laugh, and look forward to the future.

To those of you who support students who use Bookshare, we are particularly grateful. You have empowered students who were not able read because of reading barriers like dyslexia, blindness, and cerebral palsy. You make reading easier by providing ebooks in formats like audio, audio + highlighted text, and braille so that they can read in ways that work for them. You make sure that they do not fall behind their classmates by supplying textbooks and other educational materials in a timely fashion.

Most of all, you help students like Emery to believe in themselves, to believe that they can succeed in school. You silence the voices, whether their own or those of other individuals in their lives, who tell these students that their challenges are insurmountable. You are their cheerleaders and their sounding boards, their school-hours mothers and fathers, their college readiness and career counselors, their advocates, and often, their friends.

From all of us at Bookshare, thank you for all that you do, day in and day out, for students.