Minnesota's 2024 Teacher of the Year is a ninth-grade English teacher in Minneapolis, who is working to help pandemic-scarred students regain the skills they need to succeed in school.

Tracy Byrd, a ninth-grade English teacher at Washburn High School in Minneapolis, said students still want to do well but need a little more help than they used to.

"We have to help them get back to doing a lot," Byrd said of his job as an educator after the pandemic — helping students figure out how to sit in a desk, interact with others and get better at reading and writing over longer periods of time.

"I find them where they're at — and they're all over the place — and then I get them to move a little bit."

Byrd came to teaching after more than a decade in finance. He started working in schools as a hall monitor in Wayzata before his colleagues persuaded him to get an education degree and become a teacher. After receiving a master's degree from Metro State University, Byrd was hired to teach English at Washburn High in 2017.

Washburn assistant principal Michelle Terpening said Byrd's vigor, both in his classroom and as a football and track coach, is infectious.

"Anytime you walk past his classroom you can hear him," she said. "He's up, he's loud, he's vibrant. He brings an energy to Washburn."

Byrd said his colleagues' support and drive to help their students guided him as he became a teacher. Now, he said, his job is to inspire students by helping them use literature to see the world, and themselves, more clearly.

The last quarter of each school year, Byrd's students read diverse memoirs, including the graphic novel "Persepolis," about an Iranian woman's childhood, and a book by journalist Michele Norris, who grew up in Minneapolis.

Students have been able to see someone they can relate to in those books, Byrd said, and those moments of recognition have fueled them, he said.

"That's the spark that they needed," he said.

Along with Byrd, the other finalists were Rachel Betterley, a high school art teacher in St. Louis County Schools; Rebecca Buck, an elementary school music teacher in Burnsville-Eagan-Savage School District; Susanne Collins, a sixth-grade teacher in Roseville Area Schools; Sarah Dallum, a fifth-grade teacher in Bloomington; Marie Hansen, a Burnsville High School English teacher; Laura Jensen, a middle school language and literacy teacher in Hopkins; Jason Jirsa, a social studies teacher at Washburn High School in Minneapolis; Michelle Morse-Wendt, a fourth-grade teacher in Mounds View; Jamie Williams, a history teacher at Capitol Hill Gifted and Talented Magnet School in St. Paul; and Ellen Wu, a Hopkins kindergarten teacher.