They range in taste from a birdwatcher to a lover of language to a rock climber. Learn what makes each of the new staff members unique. 
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Check out the interactive map above to see the origins of  Grant’s new staff members.

Kate Allen

At the young age of five, Allen started volunteering in soup kitchens in her hometown of Milwaukee, Wisc. Service to others has always been an important virtue to Allen’s family. “I am one of those lucky people that always knew what I wanted to do since I was little,” she says. “It just really charted my course all through high school and college.”

Allen, now 39, began doing yoga in high school, taking weekly classes after school as a way to ease the stress of a busy schedule that included volleyball, track and writing for the school newspaper.

Allen still does yoga today to manage the emotional toll that comes with her job.

“Being a social worker, there’s a lot of stressful situations you’re dealing with,” she says. “It’s just good to kind of let that all go at the end of the day.”

For three years, Allen worked at various alternative schools in Gresham and Portland, mostly for Alpha and Rosemary Anderson High Schools in North Portland. Her job was to identify struggling students who didn’t attend school regularly or were failing classes, and talk to them about alternate options such as earning their GED.

In the past, Allen has incorporated elements of yoga into her student support groups to make teens feel more comfortable, a system she hopes to continue at Grant. “That’s what I like about yoga. It has the strength piece and the balance piece, and the relaxation piece.”

Scott Blevins

Before college, Scott Blevins, now 35, wanted to open a coffee shop. After working as a barista, he felt he had the experience and passion for the job.

“What I liked best about working in coffee shops was meeting people from all over the world, making friendships with people I might not have otherwise met,” he says.

Blevins “found love” when he studied literature at Northeastern University. After receiving his diploma in English, he moved back to Portland and got a job as a student teacher at Grant alongside English teacher Stephanie D’Cruz. Now with his own classroom, Blevins is excited to begin his teaching career and continue to drink his way through Portland’s best coffee shops.

Cara Benny

After graduating from Portland State University with a psychology degree, Cara Benny, 28, was unsure of her next step.

Two years working with Teach for America at a disadvantaged school in Oahu changed that.

Benny loved the high school atmosphere and cherished the connections she made with students.

The only downside was the constant repetition of teaching math.

“I ended up deciding counseling would be a better fit,” says Benny, who has a strong passion for social justice and for helping kids from low-income families get to college.

When Benny returned to Portland, she developed an interest in fashion. “In Hawaii, it’s such a casual culture and people aren’t really into dressing up,” she says. “When I moved back here and I was actually able to dress for different seasons again, it was exciting and I wanted to revamp my wardrobe.”

She spent most of last year interning at Centennial High School in Gresham until a spot opened up to be a full-time counselor. Her experience there was positive — she was able to easily build relationships with students. “I think I have a lot of characteristics that are like a teenager, so it’s not too hard to just act like myself and have kids want to come around.”

Whitney Berger

Growing up with a mother in the profession, Berger, 38, has always wanted to be a teacher. Constantly contemplating child development and how people’s minds work, Berger attended Bradley to study psychology. After graduating she wanted a change from the Midwest. She moved to Portland in 2000 to meet up with her brother, who spoke highly of his experience here.

When Berger worked at H.B. Lee Middle School, she was able to connect with the young people. “I enjoyed it,” she says, and I liked the students.” Berger remembers her grandfather always pointing out different species of birds to her when they went on outings together. She was inspired to start birdwatching because of him. “I found myself watching them in the backyard, or looking up at the sky while I was walking around,” she says.

Berger is proud to say that she’s seen every species of owl in Oregon, except for the Spotted Owl. However, raising her two young children has made finding time to birdwatch more difficult. She is eager to start a new journey at Grant. “I like preparing kids for their day-to-day lives and their future,” she says.

Sarah Epstein

Sarah Epstein, 38, grew up in New Hampshire and relocated to Portland after college. An economics major, Epstein began working at the Portland office of Enron, an energy corporation. She was thinking of going back to school for business when the company suddenly went bankrupt and top executives were arrested on fraud charges. “That definitely soured me on that idea,” says Epstein. She decided to go into education instead. She likes that “education is dynamic and your mind is always working.”

She spent the last 14 years teaching social studies at Roosevelt. She was a member of the site team for AVID, a nonprofit organization that prepares underrepresented students for college. Epstein was impressed with the program’s effectiveness, saying, “Watching it become really important to kids motivated me to become more of a part of it.” At Grant, she will be the AVID Coordinator. Not teaching in the classroom will be a big transition for Epstein, who says, “It’s hard for me not to think about lesson planning or getting my classroom ready.”

Some things haven’t changed for Epstein. She began skiing when she was only three and continues today. Now, she takes her son with her. A newer interest of hers is geography — Epstein taught AP Human Geography at Roosevelt for the last couple years and was selected this past summer to attend a geography conference in Washington, D.C. “In geography, there are so many connections with humanities, math and science, which makes it a very exciting field of study,” she says.

Yoshiko Kamata

Growing up in Tokyo, Yoshiko Kamata often danced in her great aunt’s studio. She and her sister developed a strong bond beside each other on stage, something that persists today.

Kamata, 48, is an expert in classical Japanese dancing, which, she explains, comes from the Kabuki theater, and tells stories through elaborate costuming and makeup.

She moved to Canada for an exchange program in college, where she learned to communicate with people through a language barrier. This made her decision to move to Portland a little easier. Kamata made the choice because she preferred the way graduate students were taught in the U.S. over Japan, where a student is paired up with one mentor who teaches them everything.

Kamata decided to study education because she has always connected easily with children, something she discovered through babysitting her young cousins. She was ready to give up dancing after her move to Portland, but she met a Japanese dancer located here who inspired her to learn how to do Japanese folk dancing and continue her training in classical dancing.

She decided to stay in Portland after she got a job teaching at the International School and met her husband, Michael. After transferring to teach at Richmond Elementary School, they had two children together, and both are in middle school now.

Kamata applied for the half-time position at Grant in order to have more time to spend with her children. She also is starting a Japanese dance group for young students, something still in the early stages.

Fara McCarty

A native Californian, Fara McCarty, 50, says, “the beach is my zen place.” Although she misses the warm waters of the beaches in San Diego, McCarty says she has “learned to appreciate the Oregon Coast for what it is.”

Whenever she has a spare moment, McCarty can be found knitting, reading, gardening or working with glass. She began making stained glass in high school and has since taken glass fusion classes, something she hopes to pursue more in the future.

A mother of three and a former preschool teacher, McCarty has always had a knack with kids. She began babysitting when she was 11 and taught preschool at age 19. McCarty got her degree in early childhood education from West Valley College and Portland Community College, and worked in preschools and daycares for over a decade. Despite McCarty’s love of children, the work became exhausting.

“I got kind of burnt out,” says McCarty, “it’s hard to keep up with them.”

While helping out at one of her son’s schools, a secretary there encouraged McCarty to apply for a secretary opening in the district. She got the job and loved it. “I really enjoy getting to know the kids and helping people out,” says McCarty. She speaks of her last eleven years working as a secretary in various middle schools fondly, but admits the workload got to be overwhelming. McCarty looks forward to having more secretaries to work with at Grant.

Melody McCracken

Before becoming a teacher, Melody McCracken did some part-time tutoring for middle school and high school students. McCracken, 34, says: “I started tutoring a girl in math… I rediscovered that love.”

Though she wasn’t always ready to admit it, math has been something McCracken has enjoyed all her life. She’s very happy that she chose a profession that has given her a chance to pursue her love of math while teaching others.

Growing up alongside a younger sibling can be tough. “They often want to be involved in everything you are doing and they also want the same privileges that you have as an older sibling… I begged my parents to let me get my ears pierced, but had to wait until I turned 12.  Did my sister? Nope. She managed to con my parents into getting her ears pierced soon after me.”

They didn’t always get along as kids, but to this day McCracken says that her sister is one of the best friends she’s ever had. Though they argued when they were younger, the two of them have kept a tight relationship throughout their lives and still spend a lot of time together.

McCracken enjoys doing anything as long as it’s with the people she loves. A social butterfly, she loves to cook, hike, camp and travel while surrounded by friends and family.

Doug Mella

Doug Mella, 47, has loved math for as long as he can remember — from a young kindergarten student in Parsippany, NJ, to a college student taking an overload of math classes for his master’s of teaching, and to an experienced teacher coming to Grant looking for a change of pace. “Teaching is something that makes a difference in the world,” says Mella. “I just felt that calling to the fact that education can change people.”

When teaching, Mella seeks to apply what his students learn to the real world. He often asks himself, “Why am I teaching this?” and says that if he can’t answer the question, it’s time for some new plans. A big fan of geometry and trigonometry, Mella also enjoys showing students the visual side of math. He builds models of math functions for his classes to show students how, for example, a sine graph is made.

But math models aren’t the only thing he builds. The son of an interior designer who has a background in construction and carpentry, he got a hands-on gene from his mother’s side of the family. When he and his wife bought an old Portland home that had been enlarged to nearly three times its original size, Mella set out to make some of the funkier expansions more realistic, adding bookshelves and redoing a cabinet sink.

“I really like construction things, and so I do a lot of woodworking and cabinet making and things like that at my house. I like messing with carpentry, as well,” he says. Although Mella loves his home, living in Portland has left him feeling isolated from his family back on the East Coast. “I’m all Italian, so I find that to be a big part of my identity,” he says.

Courtney Palmer

Courtney Palmer, 37, has dreamed of teaching classes at Grant for a long time, and of being a teacher for even longer. “It was always in the back of my head, the thing I wanted to do, the thing that made the most sense to me.”

She’s been able to watch Grant from afar, connected to the community through her daughter’s soccer lessons and matches at Grant. In high school, Palmer decided to join Rotary International (“a worldwide philanthropic organization,” she says) so she could experience the world outside of the confines of her small town.

She says her year in Sweden gave her a “sense of perspective on [her] interior life.” It helped her break through the barriers of being a naturally shy person. In Sweden, you are required to learn four different languages in high school. So Palmer can also speak in French, as well as Swedish and English, and she can read some Latin. “Language, and how we use it, is a tremendously powerful thing,” she says. “I don’t think we’re careful enough with it, or aware enough of what we say and how we say it. When we understand how words and usage impact meaning, we can truly read the world around us.”

Palmer is still in close contact with the host family she stayed with in Sweden, and they have a very tight bond. She has visited them multiple times and they often exchange emails and letters.

She also loves sitting down with a good book and a cup of coffee in a quiet park. “Reading takes us to new places,” she says, “into new perspectives, and gives voice to the voiceless in a truly meaningful way.”

Tony Petraglia

Tony Petraglia grew up just south of Denver, and as a high schooler enjoyed playing sports year round — cross country, wrestling and track. Petraglia, 35,  says his favorite high school class, chemistry, sparked his interest in science and inspired him to go on to study chemical engineering in college.

After college, Petraglia moved to Portland for a job at Intel, but after six years there he decided it wasn’t the right fit for him. “I wanted to get out of the bureaucracy,” he says. “I didn’t really like what I was doing.”

After a brief stint as a co-owner of Breakside Brewery from 2009-2012, things changed for Petraglia when his daughter Penny was born. “After she was born, I kind of remembered how much fun I had teaching people,” he says.

In 2014, Petraglia decided to get his master’s in education through a one-year program at Portland State University. “I think everybody that wants to be a teacher sort of knows what age group they’re good at connecting with,” says Petraglia of his decision to teach high school students.

In his free time, Petraglia enjoys trail running with his wife and his daughter in the stroller. He runs primarily for recreation, but Petraglia has done “too many races to actually count,” including the Portland Marathon, Boston Marathon and Eugene Marathon.

Although Petraglia is married with a child and a new full time job, he still admits to having some childlike tendencies. He reads comic books, follows reality TV shows like “The Bachelor,” and wakes up early Saturday mornings to watch English Premier League soccer games. “I try to stay current on what’s popular these days,” he says.

Amy Polzin

Amy Polzin, 41, grew up spending hours outside with her two younger brothers in their hometown of San Diego. Along with swimming in the ocean, she and her family often went hiking and camping, something she’s passed on to her husband and children.

Family has always been important to Polzin; her dad was a scientist and greatly influenced her love of biology. She decided to study the subject at Reed College, but wasn’t sure what direction she wanted to take her knowledge after graduation. An outreach program focused on mentoring elementary school kids in science changed that. Polzin has been teaching ever since.

“I really liked helping to develop the curriculum…and then I kind of realized it would be really fun not to help other people teach, but to get my own classroom,” she says.

Eliot and Lucy, Polzin’s son and daughter, fill up all of her time not spent teaching. Future Grant students, Polzin says they have distinct personalities: Eliot is rambunctious and loves sports, and Lucy is “quiet and shy…kind of introverted.” She enjoys taking them swimming at Grant Pool during the summer and attending their various sporting events during the school year.

Debra Sankovitz

After many years of raising her children, Debra Sankovitz’s youngest, Becca, graduated this past year from St. Mary’s High School with the class of 2015, meaning Sankovitz has more time to reconnect with an old friend – Mother Nature. “I get a little restless, especially after sitting in a small office a lot of the school year,” says Sankovitz, 54. She finds the great outdoors to be restorative, but they also serve her hunger for adventure.

After exploring a few different career paths — studying criminology in college, working for a hospital, and training to be a school psychologist — Sankowitz realized counseling was her calling. “I realized I wanted to be in the education field, in particular high school, because I love watching the incredible transformation that students go through between middle school and when they’re ready to graduate.”

A trip to Haiti in 2012 with her daughter, Madison, gave Sankovitz “the gift of perspective.” The 2010 earthquake that hit the country left many people homeless. “They live with so little. And yet, there was this inner joy that seemed to come from everybody,” she says.

The experience made her rethink the average American’s consumption of material goods in their lifetime. “We think we need all these things,” she says. “Going to Haiti allowed me to more clearly see through the difference of things I need and things I want.”

Lukas Sherman

Growing up in West Linn, Lukas Sherman, 41, was surrounded by a family of teachers. “That was a profession I grew up really respecting,” he says.

He thought about becoming a teacher his whole life. But in high school, Sherman found a new love: music. His favorite songs were there for him all through school, helping him study and brightening his mood when he was feeling upset. “Music helped me develop my individual taste in music, but also in books, film, and culture,” he says.

Years later, Sherman became an online music critic for the site Spectrum Culture, taking his love and channeling it into a job. He would listen to new albums or go to concerts, and then write up reviews. “That was the best part because I got to go to concerts for free,” he says.

The job let him combine both his writing skills and his love for music. However, he wasn’t getting paid. So Sherman decided to quit and start a family, becoming a stay-at-home dad and devoting all his time to his son.

Sherman worked as a substitute teacher for a while before finding a position at Grant, where he’ll teach English. He has music on almost all the time in his home, and he hopes to pass his love onto his son.

Matt Stevens

Matt Stevens has had his fair share of adventures: formerly an Army medic in Louisiana, a troupe member at Brody Theater, and a competitive rock climber, Stevens, 47, hasn’t had a dull moment.

He got his rock climbing start growing up in Colorado near the Rocky Mountains. He remembers hanging out near an outdoor climbing area and watching in awe as people climbed. Stevens and a friend decided to give climbing a try themselves, and after some initial “scary adventures,” he knew it was something he wanted to pursue.

When Stevens was in his 20s, his life revolved around his climbing career. He began climbing competitively and placed highly in regional competitions. Stevens traveled all over the U.S., Europe, Southeast Asia and South America to rock climb. He also coached the U.S. youth climbing team and worked as a climbing guide. “I liked to take experienced climbers who wanted to take their climbing to the next level and take them out for a couple days.”

A year after moving to Portland, Stevens and a friend noticed a shortage of climbing gyms, and decided to open their own. The gym is still going strong more than 20 years later.

His favorite part of climbing? “There’s a meditative zone you’ll get into. It feels like you’re flowing up the rock effortlessly. It’s very peaceful.”

Stevens started college with aspirations of studying social insect communication, but after a stint of teaching a college chemistry class as a graduate student, he decided to pursue the job as a career. “I’m excited to be back in Portland and super excited to start at Grant,” says Stevens.

Nicole Watson

Nicole Watson, 32, grew up in the small town of Haslett, Michigan. She found her love for education after being a teaching assistant for her mother’s fourth-grade class in her senior year of high school.

She remembers Friday night football games being a big part of her community — she says they were like “Friday Night Lights on a small scale.”

She attended Taylor University for her undergraduate degree in math education, and Western Governors University for her masters of education. She met her husband, Dave, in college through mutual friends. The two share a love of traveling, and have visited places such as Japan, India, China, Honduras and Canada.

During a trip to India in 2005, Watson taught high school students. “I see math as a very useful skill to have in life and I work hard at showing students when and where they can use math in the real world,” she says.

Five years after returning to the U.S., Watson and her husband moved to Portland looking for an adventure. She is a big fan of hiking, camping, running, and anything to do with the outdoors — with the exception of skiing. “I’m a terrible skier,” she laughs.

“I like the balance of maturity and humor” in high schoolers, she says. “Maybe you won’t like math when you leave my classroom, but at least you’ll appreciate it,” she says.