Sydney Chaffee, a 9th grade humanities teacher at a small Boston charter school, has been named the 2017 National Teacher of the Year by the Council of Chief State School Officers.
Chaffee, a 10-year veteran, teaches at Codman Academy Charter Public School, where she tries to connect history and literature to help her students learn from the past to make changes in the world.
The other finalists were Megan Gross, a special education teacher in California; Athanasia Kyriakakos, a high school arts teacher in Maryland; and Chris Gleason, a middle school music teacher in Wisconsin.