When Pueblo teacher Shaynee Jesik was fresh out of college and looking for her first teaching job, she had a few options. One was teaching in Cripple Creek. But for anyone who knows what winter road conditions can be like getting there, it held little appeal.
Making the job even less attractive was the fact that she wasn’t entirely confident about her Spanish, something, if she took the job, she would have to teach. Her Spanish, admittedly, was conversational. Teaching it gave her pause. But one thing overrode all others. “I just wanted a job,” she said. “I didn’t care.” She called them back and took it. She was confident enough that she knew, “I could teach it!” For the next two years she did. Looking back, she said, in the classroom, “I also found my passion.”
Now, approaching her 27th year in the classroom, Jesik is doing the job she’s wanted to do since high school, though perhaps there were subtle influences even earlier.
It was in high school, the Pueblo native said, when it hit her; what a teacher could actually do. “It was Judy Wodishek,” a high school teacher at Pueblo South. “She was my inspiration,” adding, almost automatically, “but I was terrified of her.”
Of course, there was another teacher who may have also played a small role. Her own mother, Carol Ortiviz Brainard, also taught. In fact, Ortiviz Brainard was one of Jesik’s own classroom teachers during her early school days. Together, the mother-daughter tandem have a nearly 60-year connection to the classroom and educational administration.
Ortiviz Brainard’s path to the classroom was not nearly as direct. After high school she made a quick stop in college. “I just did not have an interest,” she admits. After a couple of jobs, life took a quick turn, one necessitated by economics. While working at “a couple of government jobs,” and realizing she needed more income—houses and cars don’t come cheaply, she realized—“I contacted a recruiter.”“They were offering a two-year enlistment and a choice of MOS (jobs). I chose clerical.”
While it shocked her parents, “My Dad was pretty happy.”
After basic training and stationed in Virginia, she said, she found out the Army was looking to fill a few positions, including some at The Pentagon. She not only made the cut but got the job—chosen, she said, from “a full auditorium!” But the job required a polygraph, and she worried she might not pass because of something she had never before shared.
“I told them I had once stolen change out of my mother’s purse.” Luckily it wasn’t held against her.
While there, she met her future husband. “He was in The Old Guard,” an Army unit the serves the President at The White House and also appears in ceremonial and memorial functions. It was also there where daughter, Shaynee, was born. After the Army, the couple returned to Pueblo, first her, he followed when his enlistment was up. She re-enrolled in college, but this time she was ready. After graduating, she found her calling in the classroom.
Despite having a mother who taught as well as a teacher/principal father, Jesik never gave much thought to a career in the classroom. But it was that one teacher who cared more about outcome than input, changed everything. It transformed her from a young person who found treasure in books and turned her into someone who could pass on the gift to new and hungry minds.
The two women have now occupied classrooms, touched thousands of young minds and trained teachers and administrators over an arc that spans six decades.
Jesik’s career has taken her from a student teaching stop at Pueblo Centennial to Cripple Creek and back to Pueblo. There, in her hometown, a place she said she loves, she has made stops at South High School and now returned to her own old high school, Pueblo Central. It’s also where her own daughter now attends.
While her path has been serpentine, her commitment has been singularly focused on students. “From August to June, everything centers around them.” “I want to build a rapport and routine…kids love continuity.”
Looking back Ortiviz Brainard doesn’t hesitate when asked about her career’s biggest reward. “The classroom,” she said. The idea of being a stabilizing factor in their lives and making a difference is a reward like no other. “I worry about some of them,” she said. But now and then when you run into a former student “and they hug you and tell you
‘You were my favorite teacher,’” is when you get the reward. Since both mother and daughter share the same vocation, how do they see one another as teachers? “My mom is someone I would trust with my child’s life. But you don’t want to make her mad,” Jesik teases. “She’s nurturing. I am too, but in a different way.”
How she sees her daughter as a teacher? “The way she carries herself,” said Ortiviz Brainard, “as a very dominant, young, Hispanic woman…I’d think this is going to be a tough class. But I would know immediately she had my best interest in mind, and I think I would have wanted to please her.”
