NHA Teacher Lives School Motto By TARYN LAWSON The Crescent-News

National Autism Awareness Month 2017 wraps up today.

At Wauseon’s New Horizons Academy (NHA) at Sara’s Garden, where 59 percent of the students who attend have been diagnosed with autism, Jessie Wolfrum’s “kiddos” (her term) are wrapping up their end-of-course achievement tests for the state.

Wolfrum, 29, is a newer teacher at NHA, having joined the school as a high school intervention specialist for the 2015-16 school year. Now, call me an ageist, but it is for this reason that I was surprised when Matt Rychener, executive director and CEO at Sara’s Garden, recommended Wolfrum to me for an article on working with autistic students. Wasn’t I going to get someone a little more … tried and tested? You know, hardened?

But I got Jessie Wolfrum, and now I know why.

Sometimes when we speak, we give away more than the words alone were intended to. Jessie Wolfrum gave something away during our interview Friday, and I’m glad I caught it, because otherwise, our conversation was a fairly standard one.

I don’t know Jessie, really. I’ve spoken with her once. She could be anyone! It might be hard then, you could assume, to write about her. How do I know she’s a great teacher (which I do)? What if she’s actually a terrible teacher (she’s most certainly not), and I’m missing some key piece of information? The onus is on me not to trust anyone, really…

We’ll start with the standard bit: Wolfrum is a Defiance native and Tinora High School graduate who studied intervention at Bowling Green State University, before continuing on to earn her master’s degree in education.

She told me she always knew she wanted to work with the special education population.

“I had an older brother who was diagnosed with ADHD, and he was diagnosed in the early 90s, so there wasn’t a lot out there for kids like him,” Wolfrum said. “He was very rambunctious and got in a lot of trouble; he had some behavioral outbursts. So I watched him growing up, getting labeled as a ‘bad kid,’ and I thought ‘I’m going to teach kids like that. And they’re going to love it. They’re going to love school, and they’re going to love me.’”

Every item on that enthusiastically delivered list of predictions for future-Jessie, as it turns out, happened!

Wolfrum has six students at NHA, from freshmen to seniors, each with a unique curriculum suited to his or her own abilities.

Wolfrum’s own five-year-old son is autistic, non-verbal — a boy who “knows exactly what he wants, and has his own ways of telling us.”

“One of the big autism-awareness slogans is ‘different, not less,’ and I think that’s exactly it,” Wolfrum said. “They think differently, they communicate differently, but they are just as able, if not more able, than some of their neurotypical peers.”

So those are the basics. But then I asked Jessie Wolfrum a question I ask almost everyone: “What is the most challenging part of your job?”

Take a moment to imagine Jessie Wolfrum’s day-to-day job. Picture her in the classroom, putting out fires and guiding six completely unique young adults along their tailor-made educational paths. And her answer was this:

“Having a wide enough variety of knowledge myself to challenge them educationally, because these kids are smart,” Wolfrum said.

So the hardest part, for her, is being good enough for them. Earlier in our talk, Wolfrum cheerily (maybe obligatorily) recited the school’s “kids come first” motto. Her answer here, though, showed me she’s living it too.