Kayla Hilton always knew she wanted to be an elementary school teacher. 

Her mother, Ms. Susan Snyder, teaches the Introduction to Culinary Arts program at Lancaster County Career and Technology Center’s (LCCTC) Mount Joy campus, but Hilton wanted to teach younger students. She explains, “I wanted [students] to enjoy their education and to… have a good set-up, so that they can look at education as a positive thing and not a negative. That’s why I wanted [to teach] a younger age, because this really is the foundation.” 

Hilton graduated from our Early Childhood Education program at our Mount Joy campus in 2015 and attended the Harrisburg Area Community College (HACC) soon after. She says that her CTC transferrable credits were useful for saving her money and time, but she particularly emphasized how much the depth and practicality of her program’s curriculum prepared her for her future job. “You actually had hands-on. You were able to create lesson plans. You’re actually able to create the materials…. CTC definitely gave me a more realistic education [than college] on what it’s like to be a teacher,” she says, while admitting that her student teaching experience was altered due to the pandemic. 

She recalls a lesson on planting and taking care of trees that she taught to preschool-aged children while in high school. She remembers how the children responded with interest and excitement about learning. “That was the one thing that made me feel like, ‘Oh, okay, I can do this….’ It’s not going to be perfect the first time you teach. So it was a kind of confirmation, it was confirming for me that this is what I want to do,” she says. 

Hilton currently works as a second-grade teacher at Captain John Smith Elementary School in Virginia. She was recently honored as Teacher of the Year, an award that still shocks her. She says she strives to be the kind of teacher that makes an impact on her students; she described her 101st-Day-of-School celebration this year, where she dressed up as Albert Einstein and made one of her most solemn students laugh. “I’d been trying to help him build his confidence… and I hadn’t been able to make him smile all year,” she remarked. 

Hilton admits that even with a few years of experience now, each and every day in the classroom is different. She detailed one reading lesson where all of her “usual teacher tricks” for engagement fell flat. She jokingly offered to bribe her students with candy to do their work and one student “without missing a beat” gasped loudly, “Mrs. Hilton! That’s what kid-nappers do!” “Needless to say, the whole class burst out laughing – and so did I. It was one of those moments that perfectly captures the unpredictable, unfiltered honesty of teaching little ones,” she said. 

As Teacher of the Year, Hilton proves that early passion, paired with practical training and a willingness to adapt to the unexpected, can shape a successful career.