Stacey Recker stood before her first grade class at Brandywine’s Merritt Elementary School, a brand new educator, on the first day of her first class last September.

Through the year, Recker would personify elements of the educational system that have been somewhat overshadowed by budget cuts and bureaucracy. A passionate teacher, Recker talked to the Star as she made her way through her first year, setting her students on a schedule and watching as they grasped at critical initial concepts of math, reading and writing.

When the year was over, Recker, just like many first-year teachers across the country, wound up on the layoff list.

That was in May and by mid-June, Recker said she’d received word that she would indeed be back at Merritt when students file into the halls in the fall.

“I was very excited,” Recker said of her reaction to the news. “The next day I started planning what I wanted to teach.”

Though she gave herself a bit of a break at the start of her summer, Recker’s mind hasn’t completely separated from the classroom.

She’s been considering new ideas for next year, including possibly focusing on specific authors and developing more writing projects and art projects.

“I’m trying to decide if maybe I want to change the classroom behavior management plan,” Recker added. “My big thing is being able to communicate how a student’s day went with their parents at home.”

Districts like Brandywine will be forced to continue making the most of their budgets as little relief in the form of state funding is likely. But Recker said she’s not yet heard of any significant changes that will have on the classroom.

Rather, she said, there are some new programs she’s looking forward to.

“Our school is getting a brand new language arts curriculum,” Recker said. “So that opens lots of new doors,” which will incorporate the components of technology, writing and phonics.

As she prepares for her second year, the lessons of the first are not lost.

“It was very busy,” Recker said, thinking back. “I look back and I don’t even know where the year went … the first couple of months, I was just trying to keep afloat.”

She also said she wasn’t sure on that first day, at what level her students would be coming in. But now that she’s aware of what her incoming students have been working on the previous year, and she feels she’ll be more prepared. She’s already been looking for appropriate books at used bookstores for reading activities.

And her passion seems well intact. Teaching a soccer clinic for the district over the summer, Recker said she’s seen a few of her students outside the classroom.

“It just fuels the passion a little bit more,” she said.