Koerner honored as 2025-26 Teacher of the Year

The Sleepy Eye Education Association honored Sleepy Eye Elementary teacher Kylie Koerner as their 2025-26 Teacher of the Year. Above SEEA president Mindy Berkner presents Kylie the award.

Her nomination included the following reasons why she was chosen:

“Kylie is enthusiastic, hard-working, reliable, flexible, and an involved member of the school and community.

“Kylie is constantly working on ways to make learning fun. Although Kylie’s passion is math and science, I saw her work tirelessly to make the reading curriculum we adopted this year more engaging for her students. In turn, her students are excited about reading and loved the books they read this year. I have also had the opportunity to be in the classroom with Kylie while she was teaching math boot camp. The students were engaged while working out math problems and almost all the students had their hand up wanting to explain their thinking. Kylie makes her students feel cared for and valued.

“Besides teaching 4th grade, Kylie also runs a Girls Who Code class throughout the school year and summer. She is getting girls in grades 3-6 excited about coding and science. She takes a week out of her summer to run a coding class as well. Kylie is also a math masters teacher to 5th graders. She gets to school early to spend her mornings before contract time coaching 5th graders to get ready for math masters competition. They placed third as a team and a few of her students got first in multiple events.

“Kylie also is a large part of our basketball program at SEPS. Kylie spends countless hours coaching JH girls basketball and helping out at the JV/Varsity level. She also spends hours on Saturday’s throughout the basketball season running the elementary tournaments that we have at this school. Kylie is a valued member of the basketball boosters and is a large part of why our elementary program is so successful.”