2004 Riverside County Teachers of the Year selected

Joseph Balleweg from Chaparral High School in Temecula and Kristin Wagner of Palm Desert Middle School in Palm Desert were selected as the 2004 Riverside County Teachers of the Year.

Balleweg and Wagner will represent more than 17,000 teachers from Riverside County’s 23 K-12 school districts at the California Teacher of the Year competition in November.

• Balleweg is an English teacher at Chaparral High School where he has taught for the last three years. He formerly taught at Southwestern Junior High School in Chula Vista.

He has been a teacher for a total of ten years.

Balleweg is part of the curriculum design team, buddy teacher program, and site leadership team. He also is a varsity tennis coach and journalism teacher.

One of his journalism students wrote: “Though he is incredibly busy with his various commitments as the adviser of the Platinum Press, varsity tennis coach, and AP English teacher, he still manages to put his full energy into every task that comes before him.”

• Wagner has taught for 16 years and is currently an eighth-grade humanities teacher at Palm Desert Middle School.

She previously worked for Stoneleigh Burnham School in Greenfield, Maine. She is on the California Instructional Resources Evaluation Panel and California Instructional Materials Advisory Panel.

She serves as the Humanities Department Chair and is a member of the Language Arts Leadership Team.

Wagner has worked ten years with the Torres Martinez Indian Reservation on a program called Native Voices.

One of her nominators, Dennis Jory, the 1993 California Teacher of the Year, wrote: “As a class act educator, Kristin Wagner knows few equals. She is knowledgeable, innovative, well organized, hard working, compassionate, and completely dedicated to her students and the teachers she mentors.”

Locally, the 2004 Riverside County Teachers of the Year will be honored with administrators, confidential, and classified employees in May at the Celebrating Educators event held in Riverside.

The 2004 Report to the Community was written and prepared by the Riverside County Office of Education. Copyright © 2004 Riverside County Superintendent of Schools. 3939 Thirteenth Street, Riverside, CA 92502-0868