Susan Coffey, center, during the 2026 Kentucky Teacher of the Year Ceremony with, from left to right, Kentucky Board of Education (KBE) Vice Chair Lu S. Young, KBE Chair Sharon Porter Robinson, Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman and Commissioner of Education Robbie Fletcher. Photo by Myles Young, Kentucky Department of Education, Oct. 7, 2025
Susan Coffey, who was named a 2026 Kentucky Teacher Achievement Award winner, has dedicated the past 31 years to making her students feel loved and valued.
From her first day of 1st grade in Neil Wanda Craig’s class, Coffey felt called to be a teacher.
“I never will forget the compassion and the love that Ms. Craig had for us,” Coffey said. “She always kept our best interest in mind and that just inspired me. I wanted to become just like her. From the age of 5, I knew I wanted to be an educator to make children feel just as she made me feel and make the difference that she made in my life in others.”
Coffey said from that point, every decision she has made has been with the goal in mind to be an elementary educator. Growing up, she took any opportunity to teach, especially in her church as a Sunday school, youth group and Bible study leader.
Coffey, an elementary library media center specialist educator at Mt. Vernon Elementary School (Rockcastle County), began her career in 1994 as a primary teacher at Brodhead Elementary School in her hometown.
She has been an educator for 31 years and is completing her 23rd year at Mt. Vernon Elementary School. She taught 5th grade for 11 years and has served as the school’s library media specialist for the past 12 years.
Coffey has led and been a part of many vibrant learning experiences including a unit on community and government where she and her teaching partner set up a community called Coffeyville, Carolina, for their K-3 classrooms. During this unit, students studied concepts related to democracy and community jobs, through which they established their own democratic community. They held a mayoral election where students wrote speeches about why they would be best suited to be the mayor of the community.
To make their community even more realistic, they created street signs and each student’s “house” (their desk) had a house number. Each citizen had a mailbox and a mailing address. Students learned mapping skills to create a map of the community, which led to lessons about measurement and scale.
Each student was paid with Coffeyville bucks for their work within the community. Students learned how to count, add, subtract, multiply money and calculate percentages as they were required to pay rent on their homes and taxes on their property. They balanced their checkbooks and shopped at their community’s store for prizes and supplies that they earned for their work and good behavior.
Coffey said in doing this, students bought into learning because they established the community themselves. They developed important life skills, such as responsibility, good citizenship, being dependable, having good communication and organizational skills. Students were given fines and/or tickets when they broke a law the community’s citizens had agreed upon. Each student had an important role within the community that made the students willing to invest in the community and willing to do the hard work.
“The citizens of our community felt loved and valued. Each instructional unit was set up in such a way that made learning purposeful and meaningful because it was real-world and relevant to their community,” Coffey said. “My more-than-30 years of teaching experience has taught me one thing and that is that loved students achieve at their highest levels.”
Coffey teaches about 700 students a week in the school’s library media center and said she feels honored to have the opportunity to build relationships with students through the library every day.
“I am inspired by my children every day when I see them because they reflect love and goodness right back to me, so in a way I think we inspire each other,” Coffey said.
Coffey attributes her main inspiration in life to her faith. In 2002, she suffered a nearly fatal car accident that caused her to be unable to walk or sit up for several months. Many doctors had told her she would never work again.
“All I could think is that being a teacher is who I am, it is who God made me to be. Through that, I prayed that if God sees fit to put me back in the classroom where he had placed me before, I will work for Him and I will love the children even more than I ever have before,” she said.
It has been 23 years since her accident and Coffey is teaching every day and loving every child she can have in her classroom. She said she has no plans to retire because she believes she still has work to do as an educator.
Coffey earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education and completed her Rank I certification in public school administration from Eastern Kentucky University (EKU). She later returned to EKU to earn an endorsement in middle school language arts and her library media specialist certification. Coffey resides in Mt. Vernon with her husband of 34 years, Anthony, and her daughter, Katherine.
“It has been such a blessing to be an educator, so I want to thank every student I have ever had for all the efforts they have put in the classroom and thank them for being a part of our learning community. I really appreciate the opportunity to represent each of these students,” Coffey said.
Coffey said she was humbled to be recognized as a Teacher Achievement Award winner, and she encourages future teachers to always be a lifelong learner and never stop caring about and building relationships with the students you have in your classroom.
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