NILES CHARTER TOWNSHIP — As the school year nears, returning Brandywine Community Schools teachers will decorate their doors, tidy up their classrooms and begin memorizing their students’ names.

Alicia Flores and Michaele Heffner will be doing these actions at Brandywine for the first time.

Neither are newcomers to teaching or to the area, but both will start their first semester as Brandywine staff on Sept. 3.

The incoming teachers may not have formerly met each other, either, yet both spoke about the family atmosphere at Brandywine and the family atmosphere they wanted to create in their classrooms.

Alicia Flores

Michiana is a longtime home for Alicia Flores, Brandywine’s new Middle School and High School Spanish teacher. The Mishawaka resident started her teaching career in South Bend and recently spent more than a decade in Dowagiac Union Schools.

She said she did not know it when applying, but Brandywine’s staff quickly felt like a family.

“It felt kind of like home,” Flores said. “It felt like a place I had been before, people I had already known for a long time, even though it was the first I met them.”

It was a similar atmosphere to the one she has tried to create in her classrooms.

“My first-hour class? That’s my first-hour family,” she said of her previous students. “The kids thought it was kind of cute, but it was one way to try to get them to see they’re not competing against one another. They’re not against one another. We’re together.”

This fall, she said she will immediately start trying to create that atmosphere while also making her lessons personable.

Flores said one of the most difficult parts of teaching a language other than English is getting rid of assumptions about language itself, like not placing an “o” at the end of every English word to make it a Spanish word.

She said she tries to make her lessons relevant to students so that they can understand how any language is structured. Really, she said, language is all about patterns.

“They’re not archaic,” Flores said of her lessons. “They’re not unfamiliar or something that looks like it came from a photocopy. Rather, they’re personal.”

That way, she said, when students are working on things like sentence building or verb conjugation, they can realize they had done just the same in earlier English classes.

Despite 22 years of Spanish teaching, Flores did not enter college hoping to become an educator.

When she enrolled in Indiana University, Spanish was the only subject she said she truly enjoyed. After tutoring students for an anthropology class, she decided to take a few education classes.

She was hooked.

“It just felt very comfortable, like it was something I was supposed to do,” Flores said.

As parents begin to learn who their children’s teachers are, Flores wants them to know that she wants to make students feel comfortable, eliminating any tensions between students and teachers.

“I’m a parent,” she said. “Although their children are not my children, I treat them as if they were.”

Michaele Heffner

Less than two miles away from Flores’ classroom, Micheale Heffner will soon be teaching first-grade students at Merritt Elementary School.

Unlike Flores, Heffner knew she wanted to be a teacher from a young age.

Her mother was a preschool teacher at the Early Childhood Development Center at Notre Dame University. When the two went to the store, children and parents would run up and greet her mother.

“Even the old kids she had in her class, they would just talk about what impact she had on them,” Heffner said. “I just knew even from when I was little, I wanted that in my life.”

So, she went from Penn High School near Mishawaka to St. Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana, obtained her elementary education degree and began teaching in South Bend.

After six years, Heffner was ready to make a move.

“I was looking for a smaller community,” she said.

Heffner said she appreciated the tight-knit nature of Brandywine. It is what drew her in.

“Everyone’s just been so kind,” she said. “I can get that sense of community. I’m super excited about that.”

Once she starts teaching, she wants to expand that sense of community to parents and students alike.

Heffner said she also plans to make the most of her reading and childhood education minors, and her passion for reading, to get her students to fall in love with the act.

To do so, she plans to break her students up into smaller groups for more personal instruction. By the end of the school year, she wants those groups to pay special attention to books and authors.

Personal attention to books can help emergent readers find the confidence to become lifelong readers, Heffner said.

“It’s going to be super important, especially at that first-grade level, and it’s probably going to be the big emphasis each day and all day,” she said.