5 Questions for Jessie Kalloo

I graduated from Thomas Edison CTE High School in 2009 and then started the Success Via Apprenticeship program. I started officially teaching IT security and networking here in 2015.

I sat in the same seats that the students are sitting in now, walked the same hallways. Being on the student side and then being able to come back and strengthen what you were a part of really means a lot to me.

As part of my training, I spent five years rotating between classroom placements and industry work, including serving as an IT analyst for Queens Hospital and as an IT director at a Manhattan computer services company.

The SVA program showed me that great teachers don’t just teach skills, they change lives. As a product of CTE, I have been privileged to mentor new apprentices while shaping classrooms filled with future innovators. My teachers and mentors’ inspiration lives on in my work as I continue to educate and uplift hundreds of young people every year.

With CTE, we’re not only teaching them their subject matter, we’re creating the next leaders of our workforce. They’re taking charge. They’re going to be innovating. They’re going to be bringing in new technologies and new ideas.

For our IT program, our students help run the school’s computer network. They’re the network technicians. They’re the help desk support. They’re the cybersecurity analysts. They work with customers, work on remote calls, work on the network backbone. So, whatever they’re learning in the classroom, they’re able to take it out into the field — which is their school — and implement it.

Here at Edison, we try to empower our students to be leaders. We want them to make change. We want them to help lead us in the right direction, so having students take charge and be that leader of the school, I think, really makes them feel proud of what they’re doing.

It’s all come back to that sense of pride. I have pride in my building, and I instill that into my students. They take pride in their building. They take pride in being able to take what they’re learning from the classroom and see it at work and see reactions from actual customers, and I think that makes a big difference to them.

Learn more about the SVA program at nysut.cc/CTEWorks.