AMANDA DOWELL works in small reading groups with her second graders at Northside Elementary School. Here, she’s pictured with, from back, Ellie Campbell, Kelsey Goodrich and Isla James Kay. (Photo by Bob Vlach)
By Bob Vlach
Woodford Sun Staff
Students deserve to be pushed to their highest potential. So when Amanda Dowell began teaching, she knew her students needed two things from her: “I’m going to love you hard, but I’m going to push you hard because that’s what you deserve.”
Pushing students to their highest potential, she says, is only possible if a teacher builds relationships with her students – first.
“Relationships with kids are either going to make or break your career,” Dowell says. “And if kids feel like you believe in them, then they begin to believe in themselves; and then they’re able to push themselves to do things that they may not have considered trying before.”
Second grade is a huge year because students are making the shift from learning how to read to being able to comprehend what they are reading.
It’s the responsibility of Northside Elementary School’s Teacher of the Year and other second grade teachers to adjust instruction to meet the needs of students. In reading and math, that means Dowell meeting the individual needs of her students in small groups, “so that they can feel success,” she says.
Now in her 15th year in the classroom, Dowell has been at Northside for eight years – the last six in second grade. A shift from third, fourth and fifth grades was an opportunity for Dowell to help students nurture a love for reading – and “take off in my learning.”
“… So it was nice to come down to the primary world and see … where that foundation is built…,” says Dowell. Now, she says, “I love it down here.”
“It’s a great year,” she adds, “to work alongside parents to help their kids be successful.” Being able to experience their children reading to them is “an exciting thing for parents…”
Every child has an area of strength, so it’s her responsibility to build on each student’s foundation, Dowell says later.
Asked why she became a teacher, Dowell says she’s always had a love for children. It was her fifth grade teacher “who made me feel like I could do anything in the world.” It was that teacher’s belief in her that led Dowell to do what she loved.
“The teaching profession can be hard some days,” Dowell acknowledges, “but coming to work and doing what you love every day makes it worth it.”
Having her children, fourth grader Drew and second grader Jacob, come to school with her at Northside is an incredible experience, she says, because through them she gets to know so many kids and their families.
Originally from Florida, Dowell didn’t move to Kentucky until she decided to continue her education at Eastern Kentucky University because it was a teaching school. She spent her first seven years in Fayette County Public Schools at William Wells Brown Elementary School.
“I learned more there in my teaching career than I probably ever will,” says Dowell. “It just gave me a different mindset about kids and families and how they learn – and how important it is to bridge that relationship gap between them and school…”
Dowell and her husband of 14 years, Bryan, a Woodford County High School graduate, live in Versailles with their two sons.
This is the second in a series of stories profiling the 2025-26 Teachers of the Year in Woodford County Public Schools.