Bernadette Fruge, center, said she was honored and humbled to be chosen as this year's middle school teacher of the year for the Iberia Parish School District. 

Middle school teacher in Iberia Parish Bernadette Fruge said she was grateful and humbled to be chosen as the Iberia Parish School District’s Middle School Teacher of the Year.

“I am very grateful and very humbled to have been chosen for this reward,” Fruge said. “I will use this honor to further dedicate myself to my profession so that I can continue to improve and do a better job at educating my students.”

The 8th grade social studies teacher is a Lafayette native who grew up in Cameron Parish. Fruge graduated from McNeese State University where she earned a Bachelor of Arts in government. She went on to earn her teaching certificate in secondary social studies from Mcneese State University. Afterwards, she served in the U.S. Army for five years as a military police officer.

Fruge said she gained some of her most valuable teaching experience in the military, teaching fellow soldiers basic soldiering and policing skills.

She also taught elementary students as a DARE officer while stationed in Seoul, Korea. While deployed to Kosovo, she taught an ASVAB preparation class to her platoon buddies, and also taught Iraqi police officers in a police academy set up by her unit in Diwaniyah, Iraq.

Fruge said her classes are filled with passionate students who are given room to find their voices because of the safe space that is provided.

During the 2020-2021 school year, Fruge said her students maintained a highly effective growth rating of 3.50 during the pandemic despite the constant disruptions caused by quarantines and exposures.

Fruge obtained a VAM rating of more than 70% the following year when students and colleagues were quarantined on an even more regular basis.

Some of the ways that she has reached her students include coaching basketball, organizing field trips to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and to the Holocaust Museum in Houston, organizing Veterans Day programs and town halls.