Host: Kathleen Vail
Guest: Tracy Kern, Harrisburg High School (South Dakota)
Tracy Kern has spent more than two decades at Harrisburg High School in Harrisburg, South Dakota — a district that has grown from 750 students to more than 5,000 since she arrived in 2000. A Family and Consumer Science educator and longtime CTE pathway teacher, Kern was honored as a 2025 Educators Rising Champion at our Educators Rising national conference, recognized for her role in building one of the largest and most active Educators Rising chapters in South Dakota. In this episode, she sits down with Kappan Editor-in-Chief Kathleen Vail to talk about what it really takes to build a chapter that lasts.
Kern was there at the beginning — literally. Around 2017, she and a small group of administrators sat down to figure out how to launch an Educators Rising chapter at Harrisburg without a state association in place to support them. Their solution: start one. Within a few years, South Dakota had a functioning state association with more than 500 student members. Kern’s chapter, the largest in the state with around 50 students, draws members both from her Education and Training classroom and from students outside the course, using Ed Rising as the connective thread that keeps future educators engaged across multiple years.
The chapter’s programming is anything but a passive club experience. Kern’s students open the school year by welcoming new district staff with handmade bulletin board kits, address a thousand-person faculty meeting to talk about the educators who inspired them, mentor elementary students during “learning days,” and serve as room consultants at professional education conferences. The chapter’s signature event is a Future Teacher Signing Day held during Teacher Appreciation Week — a ceremony with university representatives, an institutional pledge, and the kind of weight typically reserved for student athletes. Kern created it from scratch in 2018 and has refined it every year since.
Beyond her own chapter, Kern actively mentors advisors across South Dakota, including in rural districts where CTE infrastructure is thin and a single passionate classroom teacher might be the only thing standing between a student and the education pathway. She’s matter-of-fact about why it matters: she wants future teachers in every corner of the state who are as passionate as she is, including, eventually, the ones teaching her grandchildren. After 30 years, she’s still not thinking about retirement — at least not until the work stops being exciting. It hasn’t yet.
Throughout the conversation, Kern speaks with the energy of someone who has never stopped being a student herself. She reflects on the full-circle moment of watching a freshman experience the same confidence breakthrough she had as a CTSO student decades ago, shares her philosophy on mentoring advisors in rural districts across South Dakota, and makes a direct case to prospective teachers: the challenges are real, but so are the rewards — and if you’re still excited to be with kids every morning after 30 years, that’s all the answer you need.
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