After graduating from college with a degree in African Studies, Matthew Vannice, a teacher at Peakview Academy at Conrad Ball’s Learning Center, was unsure about his next steps. He knew he enjoyed working with young people and helping others, so when an opportunity arose to be a counselor at a residential treatment center for children going through difficult times, he decided to give it a chance.
“I took the job as a tryout, working overnights from 10 to 8 four days a week,” he recalls. “It was miserable, but something about it just fell into place.” Though the hours — and the work — were extremely challenging, Matthew learned some things about what he wanted and didn’t want out of a career.
“I enjoyed the process of being able to work with kids who struggled and maybe didn’t get a fair shake, or had poor life experiences based on circumstances outside of their control,” Matthew Vannice says, explaining how after just a short time, the teacher at the facility left and Matthew was given the chance to be a teacher in the program, provided he could obtain an emergency teaching license. That led him to getting a master’s degree in special education, as well as doing much of the coursework required for a doctorate degree.
“Along my own educational journey, I found more and more connections with the students I wanted to support and help,” Matthew says. “It gave me more that I could offer, and I found that I liked to learn.”
Matthew recalls being diagnosed with ADHD as a child, and found that working with kids who have challenges in school was a perfect fit for him. He started working in TSD schools in 2008, first at Lucile Erwin Middle School and then at Peakview Academy (then Conrad Ball Middle School), where he has been since 2010.
“I found I could relate to the students I was working with in terms of impulsivity,” Matthew said. “Schools are built to meet that person who just does what they’re supposed to do when they’re supposed to do it. That’s not always the case with kids,” he explains. “There are circumstances that we all have gone through that become roadblocks and barriers. It’s easy to forget the kids in the margins, and the more we have people who don’t let us forget, the better off the system is. That is, in a nutshell, my purpose.”
Facing Adversity, Matthew Vannice Finds Deeper Connections
As committed as Matthew Vannice has always been to creating an environment where all students can reach their full potential, his mission became even clearer in November of 2022 when he had a ruptured brain aneurysm that landed him in the hospital for 21 days. The medical crisis gave him a whole new perspective on the challenges his students face.
“My brain doesn’t work the same now as it did beforehand,” he says. “It’s been a long road to recovery, but the process opened my mind to the patience and flexibility, and compassion around how difficult this is. This is the hardest job in the world.”
Matthew says that although he was always empathetic to his students, he could never fully understand the things they experienced until he faced some of those same challenges himself.
“When I came back from the stroke, everything was a big blur,” he recalls. “The overwhelming nature of recognizing how my brain needed to work gave me another level of empathy and understanding for students with difficulties with memory or low processing speeds.”
He describes the sensory overload he has encountered in the years since the stroke, and how it has affected his perspective on teaching.
“There’s all these pieces to the way students are expected to engage, and if our system isn’t flexible and patient and open to creating a platform for students, if we don’t have that, then all we’ve done is created a trapdoor and kids just fall away,” he says. “And then we haven’t done what we are supposed to do.”