Teaching was never a career choice for Megan — it was just always the plan. “I said I wanted to be a teacher when I was five,” she recalls. Growing up in her aunt’s classroom, spending summers helping set up desks and grade papers, watching cousins build careers in education — the path felt inevitable. What she couldn’t have predicted was where it would lead her.

After living abroad, Megan moved back to DC and applied to a handful of schools. Haynes called. She came in for an interview, met the kids, and never really left. That was 16 years ago.

Today, Megan teaches STEAM and coding at E.L. Haynes, and her classroom is one of the more distinctly creative spaces in the building. She’s doing printmaking with students, running engineering challenges, and teaching kids to write code — threading all of it together around a single idea: that there’s more than one way to solve a problem. “I want them to take what they learn in my class and be able to apply it to any area,” she says. “Reading, history, math, science. I want them to look at a problem and attack it from many different angles.”

What keeps that vision moving forward, she says, is trust. Leadership has given her room to try things — sourcing supplies she needs, helping hang student art throughout the building, even sending her to California to visit STEAM-focused schools and explore how teachers there are doing cross-curricular work. “As long as you’re producing stuff with the kids, they’ll support you,” she says. “They’ve been totally down.”

The community piece matters to her just as much as the classroom. Her coworkers have become genuine friends — people she hangs out with outside of school, not just colleagues she passes in the hall. She’s quick to credit the culture at Haynes for making that possible: events for staff to connect outside professional development, opportunities for students to showcase their work, a rhythm to the year that keeps people engaged with each other.

Ask Megan what it takes to thrive at Haynes and she doesn’t hesitate: be someone who collaborates, who solves problems creatively, and who genuinely enjoys being around middle schoolers. “Middle school is a really funky age to work with,” she says with a laugh. It’s not a warning — it’s a filter. The people who belong here already know they love it.

If she could go back and tell herself something on day one, it would be simple: trust your ability to make connections with the kids. “That’s really what’s kept me here for 16 years.”