Lafayette Parish educators recognized by BESE after winning state, national awards
Two Lafayette Parish educators were recognized by the state’s top education board Wednesday after winning prestigious honors, including Louisiana Principal of the Year and a Milken Educator Award.
The Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education honored several educators who received local, state and national awards during the past year, including two from the Lafayette Parish School System.
Tia Mechelle Trahan of Lafayette Middle School was recognized after being named the overall Louisiana State Principal of the Year for 2024.
Trahan is a National Board Certified Teacher and a U.S. Army National Guard veteran, where she served on a specialized task force for community outreach. She received her bachelor’s degree in elementary education from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and a master’s degree in educational leadership from LSU Shreveport.
Trahan has been an educator for 20 years, working as an assistant principal, the principal of Milton Elementary-Middle School and the principal at Lafayette Middle School. She was named the 2007 Teacher of the Year at Katherine Drexel Elementary School.
The board also recognized Corrie Campbell, a third grade English language arts teacher at Green T. Lindon Elementary School, for being one of the state’s three Milken Educator Award recipients during the past school year. The award comes with an unrestricted $25,000 prize, and the honor generally goes to early- and middle-career educators.
The award, sometimes called the “Oscars of Teaching,” has been given to 46 Louisiana educators since 2001.
Campbell was given the award at a surprise assembly in January, hosted by Lowell Milken, who leads the Milken Family Foundation. Campbell was one of 40 educators recognized in 2023, along with two others from Louisiana.
At the time she was presented with the award, Campbell was in her 11th year teaching and previously had worked in Iberia Parish, where she created a fourth grade writing challenge based on the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Campbell graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in 2008.
“As I’ve said many times, outside of a parent or guardian, there’s nothing more important to student outcomes than having quality educators across Louisiana,” said Cade Brumley, the state’s superintendent of education. “It is an honor of mine to get to work alongside them everyday, and I am thankful for them and the work that they do.”
CONSIDER SUBSCRIBING TODAY: Help support journalists like William Taylor Potter
This article originally appeared on Lafayette Daily Advertiser: Lafayette Parish educators recognized for state, national awards
