Spechts Partner With MMC For ‘Dream Big’ Teacher Scholarship
November 30, 2018
A local family aims to help students by helping teachers to be more effective in the classroom.
This year, Mount Marty College (MMC) is partnering with a Dan and Deb Specht of Yankton’s Vision Realty to offer the Dream Big Scholarship to local teachers who wish to pursue a master’s degree.
“This program has a history of rotating to different locations,” said Debbi McCuin, director of Graduate Teacher Education at Mount Marty College. “We have a site in Watertown, Sioux Falls and Yankton. A few years ago, the Yankton cohort was sponsored by Larry Ness and First Dakota National Bank, and they did a scholarship for Yankton teachers.”
“At that time, the Spechts came to me and said, ‘We would be really interested in doing something like that in the future,’” McCuin said. “Deb is a longtime teacher and Dan is a former counselor and the chairman of our board for a time. The Spechts’ history goes way back with Mount Marty; his father, Dean Specht was our dean of students for many, many years.”
The Spechts, who have had three daughters attend first Sacred Heart School and later Yankton High School, felt that helping Yankton’s teachers educationally would be particularly meaningful for them as a family, McCuin said.
“I used to teach at Sacred Heart School and our daughters all went to Sacred Heart School, so it’s very important to us,” said Deb Specht. “And I taught at the Yankton public schools. Education is hugely important to us, so for us to be able to support Mount Marty in its quest to train new teachers — we’d like to be a part of that.”
“We think it’s really important that our teachers have to ability to improve themselves,” added Dan Specht. “It, in turn, improves our students and improves our community overall.”
McCuin agreed that supporting a teacher in their education supports all the children who go through their classroom in the future. She also stressed that the program is geared towards any teacher of any age.
“I’ve had preschool teachers, through Lake Area Tech instructors come through this program and say, ‘This has transformed the way I work in my classroom: I understand how to research now; I understand how to use my own data better; I am more effective as a teacher and my students are showing that effectiveness; they are doing better on the achievement things, the behavioral things that we are collecting data on,’” she said.