ACCOMPLISHED ALUMNA
Passion Built by Experience BY LAUREN FILIPPINI (ALPHA CHI, BUTLER UNIVERSITY), MARKETING AND COMMUNICATIONS MANAGER
J
amie Bunting’s passion for teaching radiates through all she does. A special education teacher for a Georgia elementary school, she underscores all her lessons and student interactions with a simple message: you can do anything. It’s more than just talk – Jamie herself is living out this mindset every day. “I just get it. I understand what’s going on up there,” Jamie says. “I understand why they’re acting the way they are, how they’re feeling when they’re frustrated or mad because I grew up like that.” When she was 6 years old, Jamie was struggling in school, and her parents brought her to a psychologist. What followed throughout childhood and into college were diagnoses of a reading comprehension disorder, a temperament and auditory processing disorder, dyslexia and ADHD. With IEPs (individualized education programs) during school to establish services and support for her learning, as well as accommodations all the way through college, Jamie learned to never give up. “My parents never let me have an excuse. It was like, ‘You have that [diagnosis], but you still have the skills and abilities to do it. You might have to work twice as hard, but you can still do it,’” Jamie explains. “So that lives in me today in my classroom. I don’t lower the standards just because the way they’re going to get there is different.” Jamie teaches students with a range of disabilities, from emotional behavior disorders to autism to learning needs. Much of her work is around social-emotional learning, and she incorporates multi-sensory lessons, such as using puppets to tap out words. At the core of her work is building confidence. “The mountain might be bigger for them, but that doesn’t mean they can’t still climb it. They just need more support going up,” she says. 54
ALPHA CHI OMEGA
Jamie knows now that special education is the perfect career for her, but she was planning to be a nurse all the way up to sophomore year of college. She found herself struggling with academics and all the other challenges she was facing in college, including a new diagnosis of ADHD. Amid this, she realized nursing was not her passion. But she worried she wasn’t right for the teaching profession. “Growing up, I hated school. I wanted to be far away from it. … I had thought, ‘If I wasn’t good at school,
JAMIE COMPLETED THE TEACHERS AS LEADERS PROGRAM THROUGH GWINNETT COUNT Y PUBLIC SCHOOLS.