Bonnie Murray
1st Grade

E-mail: bmurray@geoacademies.org

BIOGRAPHY
I started my college education at University of Northern Colorado in 1994. After two years, I decided that teaching was definitely not what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a secretary. So, I decided to go to Blair College, but, after one year, I decided that it would be a great idea to get married. I married my now ex-husband in 1997 in Louisiana. I attempted to complete my college education at Northwestern State in Louisiana, but the military transferred my husband to Germany. I decided to let him go ahead and I would go back to Colorado to finish my college before joining him in Germany. But, after one semester, my husband was told that he would be deploying. So, I decided that seeing him for a few weeks here and there was better than not seeing him. I then moved to Germany and spent two and a half years there traveling and being a tourist to the various European countries. While I was there, I dabbled in insurance office management, gift shop management, and dental assisting.

After our time in Germany was up, my husband and I were sent to West Point, New York. While I was there, I became a tour guide and was predominately given the school groups to be the tour guide for because of my way with the students and bringing the history alive to them. I learned to say “Thank you” in five different languages! Because I was so well with the students on the tours, my boss asked me if I would like to be a school bus driver and that he would train me (West Point Tours does all the tours on West Point and also has a fleet of buses that run to all the schools in the area). While there, I decided that now would be a great time to finish my degree. I graduated with my Bachelors in Social Sciences from St. Thomas Aquinas College in New York in 2003. The only problem was that I had not a clue what to do with this degree!

A colleague of mine thought that I would be a great school counselor, since I had helped several of my bus students work their way through things in order to graduate. So, I enrolled in Long Island University in their School Counseling Program. I graduated with a Masters in Education in School Counseling one year later. That was the longest, sickest year that I have ever had. During that time, I got divorced, had laryngitis three times in one month, and had the worst apartment ever! I don’t know how I made it through, but when I graduated, I was twenty pounds lighter and so tired that I fell asleep during the graduation ceremony.

After graduating, I had trouble finding a job in New York, so I moved back to Colorado. I worked at different jobs (physical trainer, waitress, night help in a department store), but could not find a job without teaching/classroom experience. I started substitute teaching, and discovered that I loved teaching elementary. I decided that if I was going to get the experience that everyone told me I needed, I should get my teaching license and then I could get on with my counseling. The only problem with that plan was that I fell in love with teaching. I graduated from University of Phoenix in 2008. I have come full circle back to teaching, and I love it.