Administrator of the Year: Clay Long

Assistant ICAT Administrator Director of Career & Technical Education for Nampa School District #131, Nampa Idaho, CTEI past President, CTEI Member and ACTE Member for the past 5 Years.

Clay entered the CTE arena during his high school years as a state and national officer for a Career Technical Student Organization. Shortly after serving as a student member, Clay became the State Coordinator for Idaho DECA and helped lead the first joint CTSO conference in Idaho's history, bringing nearly 1,700 students, advisors, and guests from two CTSOs to a joint state conference. This was just the beginning of his innovation within CTE. Mr. Long serves as the Assistant Director for Career & Technical Education at the Nampa School District. In his role, he is responsible for the oversight of operations, standards and alignment, assessment, and Career & Technical Student Organizations for all 28 Career Pathways within the Nampa School District. During his tenure, he has directed the work of vertical and horizontal standards alignment ensuring each teacher has a set of high-quality standards that sequential teaching and learning for students as they progress through our programs. Clay also led the work of our 14 business teachers to develop district-wide pacing guides and common assessments for teachers to use in their PLTs and to allow for professional development by peers to improve instruction resulting in higher student achievement. This process has continued through the other five program cluster areas of developing common assessments for any course that is being taught by multiple teachers. Clay started another advocacy effort for our district by launching the ICAT Industry Summit. (ICAT stands for the Idaho Center for Advanced Technology, the Career Technical School of the Nampa School District). This event was a focus of engaging local industry to provide direction and guidance for our overall comprehensive system, rather than just a specific Technical Advisory Committee for one program. In attendance were industry executive leaders, elected officials, and chamber of commerce leadership. After a 90-minute roundtable, participants were invited to tour Nampa's 28 Career Pathways. The results were positive and have provided for additional industry engagement in programs and advocacy for CTE.

Teacher of the Year: Dan Armstrong

Business Technology Teacher at Ridgevue High School, Nampa Idaho. Dan understands and embraces the value of what he does in the classroom with secondary students.  Through his innovative thinking and desire to share with CTE teachers in Idaho Dan was the founder of Create Idaho. This is a unique partnership between Adobe and the State of Idaho to offer CTE teacher’s opportunities to learn, share and collaborate in using the Adobe Suite of products in their classrooms. Dan has established his reputation for innovation and excellence with students, faculty, staff and community.  With the development of the curriculum and hands-on industry standard instruction, Dan’s students have a 100% pass rate on their TSA and WRA.

New Teacher of the Year: Spencer Christensen 

Business Technology Teacher for Grace High School in Grace Idaho, CTEI Member. He is often formulating new ideas and has recently introduced three new Career Technical Education courses into the small school of Grace's business / technology program curriculum including Web Design, Student Enterprise and Graphic Communications. 

As a dedicated CTSO advisor the Business Professionals of America chapter had 65 students compete with 50 qualifying for the State Leadership Conference and 14 who qualified for the National Leadership Conference.  This detail might go unnoticed if you didn't know that there are just 148, 9 through 12 grade students at Grace High School.  And while competing is impressive his greater philosophy of guiding students through leadership opportunities and community service projects far greater speaks to his commitment and talents as a teacher.