Rachel Johnson doesn’t have a regular classroom. She has a minivan.
Beside her son’s baseball gear, foldable camp chairs and a striped umbrella, a plastic tote bin full of student files is nestled in a crevice behind the last row of seats. A white board is attached with carabiners to one of the seats, with photos of her family next to her daily itinerary, scrawled in bright-colored dry erase markers.
A binder for each of Johnson’s assigned students — 11 total — is tucked in the plastic bin. As the school year progresses, those binders will grow fat with assessments, goal trackers and education plans for each of her deaf and hard-of-hearing students.
Johnson, now in her 15th year with Akron Public Schools, was recently named one of the State Board District Teachers of the Year for 2027, representing a region that includes Summit County, half of Cuyahoga County and part of Geauga County. The recognition came as a surprise, but Johnson said it won’t change the day-to-day work she does to advocate for her students.
“What I’m doing is not a traditional teaching job,” she said. “It’s a nice reminder I’m still a teacher.”
It is a niche job inside a seemingly ever-shrinking profession. Fewer college students are studying to become teachers, and even fewer are those studying to meet the needs of students with hearing impairments.
The award recognizes her work in the classroom and places her among a cohort of 10 other educators — from English teachers to orchestra conductors — from across the state who will attend professional development and other events throughout this school year.
As an itinerant teacher, Johnson does not have a traditional classroom of students she teaches every day. Instead, she works with a small number of deaf and hard-of-hearing students in one-on-one sessions — including the 11 students whose binders are in her van — or covers for other teachers with full classrooms of those students to give those staff members a break.
On a Thursday afternoon, she was at Ritzman Community Learning Center with a class of kindergarten through second-grade students who all had varying levels of hearing loss. Johnson’s presence allowed their regular teacher to have a planning period.
Some students wore cochlear implants, others had in-ear hearing aides that connected with a small microphone that hung around their teacher’s necks to transmit clear audio to each child. She moved through the room and spoke to each student as she signed a story about a day spent at a park, connecting it with pictures the children had colored in just moments earlier.
Her work schedule is similar to a speech therapist, she explained, and can focus on topics such as phonics — hearing loss can make phonemic awareness more difficult — helping children and teens choose the adaptive technology right for them and to learn to advocate for themselves and their needs with other staff.
Her students range from children with cognitive delays or disabilities to the intellectually gifted — kindergarten through 12th grade. Some are in special education classrooms, others are in general education settings, with each child requiring different consultations and accommodations.
Her job, like her classroom, is transient. It is working in hallways, stairwells and libraries between a student’s core classes, squeezing precious minutes of instruction in every week.
“They still have an intervention specialist that writes their whole IEP. … I’m literally just doing that one thing — whatever the team feels [the student] needs from me,” Johnson said.
‘I fell in love with the language’
Johnson followed in her mother’s footsteps by becoming a teacher. But it was an experience at First United Methodist in her hometown of Hamilton, a Cincinnati suburb, that spurred her to serve hard-of-hearing children.
“For a brief period, one young man who was in our youth group was hard of hearing,” she explained. “His mom would teach us songs in sign language just … for that inclusivity and acceptance piece.
“And I fell in love with the language.”
Akron’s industrial roots made it home to one of the nation’s largest Deaf communities — as factories recruited men whose limited hearing was an advantage for loud, demanding roles in rubber and printing factories. Nearby, Kent State University is one of few colleges in the state that offers an initial licensure program for teachers to specialize in working with deaf and hard-of-hearing students.
She graduated from Kent’s Deaf Education program in 2009 and two years later joined APS at Ellet Community Learning Center. That position focused on high school students. With the district’s shift to housing different college and career pathways across its seven high schools, educational support for those students became more transient.
Johnson did not originally have this itinerant role, she said, but took it on when another teacher transferred out of it. She maintains an office at Ellet CLC but spends more of her time working out of her minivan.
As caseloads changed year after year, Johnson chose to stay itinerant — moving between buildings, helping students as needed and working with long-term substitutes filing in open intervention specialist positions.
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Award could spur interest in niche field
Working with those substitutes, and new teachers, has become the bulk of Johnson’s job in recent years — it’s a continued feature for the 2026-27 school year.
“It looks like stacked [professional] development, it looks like finding out what can they do and what can’t they do and which things are fundamental,” she said. “It’s looked different every year — what [do] these humans, whether they be subs or students — need from me this year?”
There are efforts to address the nationwide teacher shortage — such as graduate coursework offered at Shawnee State University to license teachers of the Deaf/Hard of Hearing. This school year in Akron Public Schools, Johnson will not only address her students’ needs but also help onboard three new teachers for students with hearing loss.
Of those new staffers under Johnson’s wing, one is a new hire from out of state, another moved to Akron from Columbus, and a third is a recent Shawnee State grad.
“I do think education itself is a field that less and less people are pursuing and then to have it also be a niche field on top of that complicates it,” Johnson said. “Several people have said me winning [this award] is cool because it is providing an opportunity for exposure about a field that’s not well known — and that there is a need.”
As part of her state teacher of the year cohort, Johnson looks forward to a conference for high school students interested in becoming educators later this year. She hopes to inspire some to follow in her footsteps and fill that need.
At the end of a muggy late-summer day, Johnson walked her youngest students to their awaiting vans at Ritzman CLC, then packed up for another day spent putting miles on her minivan.
