Making a Real ‘Splash’
By: North Dakota United
Tags: Disability, North Dakota, Ndu Member Profiles, Teachers, Education

Lynae Holmen is special, even among these special educators. She is a special education teacher, specializing in deaf and hard-of-hearing students, for Longfellow Elementary School in Minot. And she loves what she does.

“I think I have just been so blessed,” she said, about her job. “I mean I can’t remember waking up one day in the past 35 years and saying, ‘Well, I wish I didn’t have to go to work today.’ When my feet hit the floor, I am ready to come to work. And part of that is, you know, a testimony to Minot Public Schools and the people that I work with.”

At the beginning of the 2017–18 school year, Holmen was named the Minot Education Association Teacher of the Year at a public assembly, in front of students and her colleagues. It was an honor well-earned, but also somewhat uncomfortable for Holmen. “It’s really not me,” she said. “I have worked as support staff all these years. I’m used to being in the background, not in the limelight. And so it was really hard for me, and overwhelming, and very humbling.”

She was then selected as one of five finalists for the North Dakota Teacher of the Year award. Holmen says that she is honored by these individual achievements, but views them as a tribute to the teams she is a part of, at Longfellow Elementary and throughout the Minot public school district.

“When I did my speech for Minot Public School employees, I went off my favorite quote, which is ‘Blessings are meant to splash.’ And I talked about how much, in the past 34 years of teaching, I have been splashed by people who I work with and that whole community of staff.”

“We work hard to splash our students, and we work hard to take care of each other, splash each other,” Lynae Holmen said. “We have to now work hard to splash those who come behind us, because they’re walking into a job that, I believe, is tougher maybe than it’s ever been.

Holmen’s path to teaching began in Great Falls, Mont., where she grew up. “Both of my parents were teachers,” she said. “My mom was in elementary, and my dad was a middle school-high school social studies teacher. And so I grew up living the teacher’s schedule, watching them correcting papers every night, going to school with them, when they did their work at school.”

She said their house was close to the School for the Deaf and the Blind, and that she grew up in, and learned a lot from, that community. “We had deaf neighbors,” Holmen said. “I had a friend who was hearing but had deaf parents. So I grew up with that deaf culture around me. So when I got into high school, they offered sign language as a foreign language. I took that and then I ended up helping as a student assistant in that class. And then my senior year, I went to school half days, and the other half day I volunteered at the School of the Deaf and the Blind. I had a really good mentor there, and I really knew that’s what I wanted to do.”

Her desire to work with the hard-of-hearing is what brought her to Minot. “I landed at Minot State because, at the time, Montana didn’t have any schools with programs for deaf education. So when I got to Minot State, I took the dual track on elementary education and deaf education.”

The technology used for communicating with hard-of-hearing students has changed a lot during Holmen’s years as a teacher. She said she used to wear a microphone that fed input into receiver boxes that the students wore, strapped to their chests, with cords that plugged into their ears. And they used typewriter boxes that they called “TTD.” “You take the phone and put it on the box, and then you have to type to each other through the phone lines,” she said. “It was just a pain.”

Lynae Holmen, center, poses for a picture with Gov. Doug Burgum and Superintendent Kirsten Baesler outside of Fargo South High School in September 2017.

Now, most of her students have cochlear implants and highly technical hearing aids that allow them to hear. “Amplification’s changed so much,” she said. “It’s so much better. … I have students right now at this school who are implanted, and it makes such a huge difference. And the way that they can program even just regular hearing aids now, it gives kids so much more input into speech.”

She sees her role, as a teacher, as similar to these technologies. She is a resource that allows her students to connect to the world around them, and to interact with the people surrounding them. And the best way to do that is to “splash” the blessings we receive to everyone who surrounds us, every day.

“We work hard to splash our students, and we work hard to take care of each other, splash each other,” she said. “We have to now work hard to splash those who come behind us, because they’re walking into a job that, I believe, is tougher maybe than it’s ever been. If we don’t take care of them and build them up and give them that sense of community so that they can do that for the people who then come behind them, they’ll be in real trouble. We have to take care of each other.”