A fugitive Nazi colonel’s daughter, born in Vietnam, adopted by a U.S. Army adviser in 1954, and brought to the United States, has been named the 1985 National Teacher of the Year.
The winner, Therese Knecht Dozier, 32, has taught world history to 10th graders for the past seven years at Irmo High School in Columbia, S.C. She previously taught in Gainesville and Miami after earning her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Florida.
Ms. Dozier and her brother grew up in Florida with the family of a U.S. soldier who found them in a French orphanage in Saigon in 1954--when she was 2 years old--and brought them to America.
Ms. Dozier was abandoned by her father, who joined the French Foreign Legion and was sent to French Indochina after fleeing Nazi Germany in the final days of World War II.
The award is presented jointly by the Council of Chief State School Officers, Encyclopedia Britannica, and Good Housekeeping Magazine. Word of Ms. Dozier’s honor was leaked by Jack Reynolds and Co., a New York public-relations firm; she will receive the award April 17.
