{"id":399591,"date":"2026-07-15T17:25:11","date_gmt":"2026-07-15T17:25:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/399591\/"},"modified":"2026-07-15T17:25:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-15T17:25:11","slug":"summit-celebrates-achievements-of-sdusd-high-school-teaching-interns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/399591\/","title":{"rendered":"Summit celebrates achievements of SDUSD high school teaching interns"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Interns at Teach Lead Summit share what they learned teaching elementary school classrooms. (Photo by Nicole Abrams\/Times of San Diego) Credit: Nicole Abrams<\/p>\n

Kelly Padilla felt lost before she joined the Teach Lead Summer Internship program last year. Now, having completed her time as a lead intern, she said that the role has given her purpose.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is literally the happiest I\u2019ve ever felt in my life,\u201d Padilla said.<\/p>\n

Interns, teachers and parents recently gathered at Crawford High School\u2019s theater for the Teach Lead Reflective Summit to celebrate the accomplishments of San Diego Unified School District<\/a> students who participated in the internship program.<\/p>\n

The five-week paid internship sends students from high schools across the district, including Crawford and Patrick Henry High, to teach in elementary school classrooms for the summer. The internship program is available to any student in SDUSD who is 16 and older.<\/p>\n

This year marks the fifth anniversary of the program, which launched in 2021. Twenty-two students from Mira Mesa and Canyon Hills high schools participated in 2021. This summer, interns from five high schools taught at 18 schools.<\/p>\n

The participating elementary schools include Rosa Parks Elementary in Fairmount Village, Gage Elementary and Green Elementary, both in San Carlos, and Hearst Elementary in Del Cerro.<\/p>\n

The program is a partnership between the Franklin Covey Education Group, San Diego Unified\u2019s Extended Learning Opportunities Department, TEACH\/LEAD and the College Career and Technical Education Department.<\/p>\n

The interns spend five days training with coaches from Franklin Covey, and two days with their CCTE teachers to learn how to be professional and manage a classroom environment, according to Tobie Pace, senior director of Extended Learning Opportunities for San Diego Unified, which helped create the internship program. The interns then spend three weeks in elementary classrooms for five hours a day.<\/p>\n

Pace said that her passion is helping high school students find their voice. She said that this was an opportunity to persuade students to become educators in the district.<\/p>\n

\u201cI believe in students and keeping our students here in San Diego,\u201d Pace said.<\/p>\n

Pace highlighted the phrase on the back of the interns\u2019 T-shirts: \u201cFind your voice.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe want our students to find their own voice and to be proud of who they are individually, whatever that looks like,\u201d Pace said.<\/p>\n

During the summit, the interns shared their experience teaching young kids, some in speeches, others with skits and dances.<\/p>\n

Many said that they were nervous about teaching a class of young students, but ended up learning different strategies for how to help them thrive.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Padilla, a recent graduate from the San Diego School of Creative and Performing Arts, said that she wants to be a speech language pathologist in special education.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cMy favorite thing about doing this internship was finding that confidence in myself, and knowing that I\u2019m not only a leader for other people, but a leader for myself,\u201d Padilla said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Interns at Teach Lead Summit share what they learned teaching elementary school classrooms. (Photo by Nicole Abrams\/Times of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":399592,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[29881,58518,25368,6573,74,76,75,1354,160431],"class_list":["post-399591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-diego","tag-crawford-high-school","tag-del-cerro","tag-patrick-henry-high-school","tag-san-carlos","tag-san-diego","tag-san-diego-headlines","tag-san-diego-news","tag-san-diego-unified-school-district","tag-teach-lead-internship-program"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=399591"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399591\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/399592"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=399591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=399591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=399591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}