Congratulations to Chris – 2020 Ocean City High School Teacher of the Year!

OCEAN CITY, NJ (May 8, 2020) - Congratulations to Chris – 2020 Ocean City High School Teacher of the Year!

It is the end of Teacher Appreciation Week and we wanted to thank everyone that participated in celebrating our Ocean City teachers! We also want to give an extra special shoutout to our Teacher of the Year, Chris Clark!

Chris Clark, Social Studies Teacher, is a cornerstone of the High School by serving as a model of hard work, passion and high standards. These skills are demonstrated by Chris in various leadership roles. Most importantly is that Chris ensures that each student believes and feels that he/she belongs to and at the High School. He also ensures that he meets his students’ needs and responds to their needs accordingly. Because Chris knows that this important to do, he developed the APUSH 1 curriculum into a disciplined, introductory Advanced Placement (AP) course, a banner course for helping students understand the AP commitment to coursework. Chris makes history come alive for the students by giving them creative, engaging, exciting social studies learning experiences.

Wanting the students to feel that they belong in his classes and school are further accomplished by encouraging them through verbal and written feedback, by emailing guidance counselor and parents, by attending students’ extra- and co-curricular events and by coaching two teams. This sense of belonging is so important to Chris that he shares insights how to help students facing today’s problems and their own problems as an IR&S team member.

As an innovator, Chris co-developed with Nicole McMaster the Freshman Team Building Day and Freshman Mentoring Program. This Program is all about building a sense of belonging and connecting with freshmen from over a dozen middle and intermediate schools. Chris makes sure that sense of belonging starts in the freshman year and carries all the way through to shaking the hand of each senior as they are about ready to walk across that stage to graduate!

As an established veteran teacher, Chris shares his knowledge and experiences by serving as an informal and formal mentor to new teachers. He also seeks new and better teaching strategies, which positively influences the department and faculty. He is constantly improving content for his AP history classes. With his PLC members and other Social Studies teachers, he meets regularly to create, maintain, and update a program that best meets the students’ needs. Chris does this with ease because of his willingness to share, to guide, to support, and he enjoys it. And we enjoy Chris’ “Ugly Christmas Sweater” contest. And we also enjoy when he shares the best TV series to watch (The Wire – thanks, Chris). Chris makes his students and all of us feel that we belong!