Excellent Educators: Nicole Miller

Excellent Educators is a WAVY-TV 10 initiative to celebrate local teachers who have gone above and beyond for their students and communities during the last academic year. These Excellent Educators were nominated by their school divisions. Congratulations to these educators for all of their hard work and accomplishments!

PORTSMOUTH, Va. (WAVY) – Portsmouth’s Excellent Educator, Nicole Miller, has worked to make the library at I.C. Norcom High School a place for healing.

Miller is one of two librarians at the school and leads the charge on a book reading competition, where students compete for points by answering questions about the reading each week. At the end of the year, those with the most points wins a celebration.

Miller said she chose the book they are currently reading, ‘A Long Way Down’ by Jason Reynolds, is about a student debating seeking revenge with a gun.

“Unfortunately, as many of us know, we have had some tragedies in Portsmouth, of course, with gun violence,” Miller said. “We’ve lost a student here this year. And so just kind of providing an outlet for the kids to be able to read and for the staff and students to come together and kind of process that trauma and grieve and cope and heal in a healthy way. So that’s what we’re working on right now.”

Miller also told 10 On Your Side’s Brett Hall she is trying to teach her students a better way.

“The students have, they’ve loved it. The staff have been super supportive,” Miller said. “This year, we had 47 readers, which is the most that we’ve had since we’ve started.”

Miller said her job is complete when students who were not interested in reading before become interested.

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