Missouri’s 2025 Teacher of the Year award goes to a Kansas City-area educator. Jennifer Jones, who teaches English at Lee’s Summit West High School, will be representing the Show Me State as the Teacher of the Year.
She was selected by a committee of her peers and education partners across the state. Jones becomes the 56th Missouri Teacher of the Year since the program rolled out in 1957.
“I think teachers tend to be pretty humble,” she told Missourinet. “We tend to do our jobs and put a lot of effort in. To be recognized is always an honor. I am so happy to represent all the amazing educators out there. I don’t see this as an award for myself. I just see myself as one selected person to speak for so much hard work and good work going on.”
Like many people in her profession, Jones said that two of her teachers influenced her to want to be a teacher. She grew up in the northeast Minnesota town of Hibbing.
Missouri 2025 Teacher of the Year Jennifer Jones (Photo permission given by Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education)
“I love all of writing and that if you really can figure out how to be both creative and persuasive at the same time, boy, you’re really onto something there. And that’s what I’ve always tried to do in my teaching, is like incorporate both the creative and the academic side of writing and reading,” she said.
Jones has been a teacher at Lee’s Summit West High School for the last 19 years of her 23-year career. She explained why she enjoys teaching high school students.
“I really just appreciate that they are real with you,” Jones said. “Sometimes you do not know want to hear the real that they’re sharing with you about what they don’t like about school. But they’re real with you, and you can be pretty real back with them. It works well for me and who I am as a person.”
What does she love most about teaching?
“Obviously, there are standards that we’re trying to get all students to reach in the academic fields we’re teaching. But I think, to me, more important to that is that everybody is improving every day, and everyone’s path towards that improvement is different. I can think of specific students from last year who struggled mightily to organize a three-page paper. But by the end of the year, they’re writing a 10-page paper. I mean, those moments for me, where I see that each individual student is progressing, that’s what keeps me coming back,” she said.
Missouri 2025 Teacher of the Year Jennifer Jones gets a hug from State Education Commissioner Karla Eslinger (Photo permission given by Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education)
Her other passions in the teaching field include addressing teacher burnout and retention. She said low teacher pay and heavy workload are contributing to teachers leaving the profession.
“There is kind of a crisis developing in education, where not only do we not have as many college graduates going into the field, we have teachers who aren’t lasting very long in the classroom. I just am really advocating for changes in the profession that would allow people who want to do this important work and do it well. I want it to be feasible for them, and I want it to be a profession that people feel like they can stay in long term,” said Jones.
Specific to her subject, Jones is also passionate about providing students access to stories with people from a variety of backgrounds.
“When we do that in our classrooms, I think there’s sometimes a misconception that we’re telling kids how to think about the stories. I generally think that’s not true,” said Jones. “I think we’re just giving them access to different stories that maybe they haven’t heard from, from perspectives they haven’t heard from.”
Jones earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of Minnesota at Morris and a Master of Education in Educational Psychology from the University of Missouri-Columbia.
She will be honored during the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s Teacher of the Year recognition event on October 21, along with the other finalists, semi-finalists, and Regional Teachers of the Year. Jones will move on to serve as Missouri’s representative in the National Teacher of the Year program.
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