Sitting cross-legged in a Colombia, Maryland, classroom, a fifth-grade boy defies expectations by reading an iconic Dr. Seuss line to his first-grade reading buddy. “Do you like green eggs and ham? I do not like them, Sam-I-am.” Two years ago, this same 11-year-old couldn’t read a full sentence. He was written off by his teachers, who declared he would never read properly. Two years ago, he, too, believed it was a skill he would never master.

Enter Deborah Robbins. “No child is unteachable,” she says. “I can teach them all something.”

Robbins has been a special education paraeducator at Guilford Elementary School for the past 14 years. Paraeducators provide specialized or concentrated assistance to elementary and secondary school students. Her passion for teaching special education students stems from her daughter Rachel’s scholastic challenges. Rachel couldn’t grasp spatial reasoning, so Robbins sat her at the family computer and had her stack block upon block in Tetris. When she struggled to memorize math facts, her teachers used a multi-sensory method that places counting points on numbers to help her understand how a symbol represents a quantity. With this intensive support, her grades, and her comprehension, improved.

Now 26, Rachel is in graduate school studying to become an audiologist and continues to use the techniques she learned throughout her youth. Robbins witnessed how building confidence in a child, paired with the right academic interventions, can set them up for a success.

Today, Robbins teaches students with various learning disabilities. By working tirelessly to build up her students’ confidence and search out the right interventions for each one’s learning style, Robbins helps her students flourish. “That’s where my heart and passion is. I love working with special-ed students,” she says. “I just don’t want to see a child fail.” The boy who spouted Dr. Seuss at the start of this story is part of a larger group of once-struggling readers who, through Robbins’ tutoring, have improved to such a degree that they can volunteer as reading buddies for younger students.

Beyond literacy, she’s addressed other local issues with her students, including accessibility and bullying. The latter hit close to home; her students have been tormented for everything from their physical looks to their academic potential. And if being a special education teacher isn’t enough, Robbins runs an after-school program where she tutors students in Grades 3 to 5 and engages them in service-learning. Using WE resources, Robbins deepens students’ understanding of subject matter and helps them build connections between the classroom and the real world.

As part of a service-learning lesson on bullying, Robbins taught her after-school group how to behave on the internet, how to recognize cyberbullying and what to do when they are on the receiving end of hateful remarks. The students then made anti-bullying posters to educate their peers and spread kindness throughout the school. She hasn’t had an instance of bullying in the after-school program since. Cases of special-ed students being bullied by their general-ed peers have subsided as well.

To thank her for her dedication to her students, Walgreens surprised Robbins on stage at WE Day Baltimore with a $500 WE Teachers award to purchase much-needed school supplies. “I was shocked. Then the tears just started to stream out of my eyes,” she says.

Just before WE Day, Robbins had taken stock of her marker supply, something her students use regularly for classroom work and service-learning projects. Some of them are coming up on seven years old—older than some students—and are in dire need of replacement. The financial burden of restocking them, and any other school supplies, often falls to her. She was overjoyed by the prospect of replacing them. “I love to see my kids succeed. In service, in the classroom, everywhere,” she says. “No one’s failing—not on my watch.”