Growing Teens Into Teachers

Running a preschool inside a high school gives students the chance to try out a career in education—and it benefits the teens and tots alike.

April 12, 2024

The Career and Technical Education building at Fauquier High School includes classrooms dedicated to skills you might expect: woodworking, cooking, and car maintenance. But enter Nancy Nye’s room, and you’ll encounter students getting a very different kind of hands-on experience: running a fully functioning preschool.

Nye’s Early Childhood Education class allows high school students to gain firsthand experience with teaching preschoolers. The students design and lead lessons, redirect children who aren’t listening, and—perhaps the hardest lesson of all, according to Nye—learn to say “No.”