In Columbia Falls, a host of former students have returned to teach

Looks like you can go home again.

Columbia Falls School District 6 in recent years has seen an influx of alumni returning to teach in the schools where they themselves were once students.

This year alone, six of the district’s 21 new hires are all Columbia Falls graduates, including Austin Barth, Alexandra Damon, Ciera Finberg, Sara Kavanagh, Evan Miller, and Samantha Radabah. There are several others who have graduated from Columbia Falls and returned to teach as well, including Josiah Osborne, Lindsey (Henning) Racioppi, Josh Forke and Cecilia Byrd-Rinck to name a few.

Much of the draw for returning alumni is the presence of family and the strong sense of community that Columbia Falls offers, returning graduates said.

Barth, a 2012 Columbia Falls graduate and Montana State football player, who began teaching social studies at the junior high this fall said the opportunity to help coach in the district, as well as being around family, were large factors in his choice to come back after teaching in Big Sky and Anaconda. “I only knew the teachers by their last names, so starting to call them by their first name was, it’s different,” Barth said with a laugh. “So that’s been a little bit of a learning curve, but other than that it feels so good being home, especially in the junior high. It’s been a very smooth transition, even with all this Covid stuff going on.”

Finberg, who graduated in 2015 and began teaching senior English at the high school this fall, returned after teaching for a year at C.M. Russell High in Great Falls. “It was a good experience and everything but it just, it wasn’t home,” Finberg said. “I always loved the sense of community in Columbia Falls. I thought it was a really great place to grow up and to learn and I just really missed the sense of community more than anything else. I feel like I was given so much by this school and this community, that if I had a chance to start returning to others all that I was given, I couldn’t turn that down.”

Several alumni are teaching in the exact classrooms in which they learned the same subject years earlier, including high school English teacher Willow Moran, who was

hired in 2017, and 2014 graduate Samantha Radabah who began teaching kindergarten at Ruder this fall.

Kavanagh, a 1998 graduate, returned to teaching full-time this fall as Ruder’s music teacher after taking a break to raise young children from nearly a decade of teaching first and second grade in Bozeman.

Kavanagh continues a family legacy, following in the footsteps of her mother, Roxy Rogers, a Columbia Falls student herself who then taught elementary in the district for decades, and her mother-in-law, Kristin Kavanagh, who also worked for the district, much of it as Canyon Elementary’s school secretary.

Kavanagh appreciates the heritage and the value it’s bringing her as an educator.

“I think it’s pretty special and amazing,” she said. ‘I’m so blessed to have so many teachers that actually taught with my mother, who taught in the district for almost 40 years. And my mother-in-law having been a school secretary for 25 or more years in the district as well, there’s just a lot of history there. Just being able to come back and see the amazing growth in the district, not only in the numbers of kids, but in the teaching and the quality of teachers that are here, it’s wonderful.”

Nearly all of the returning graduates said the unfamiliar, slightly awkward transition of calling their former

teachers, now colleagues, by their first names.

Moran said the return has given her a renewed perspective on her predecessors’ experiences.

“It’s really interesting to teach alongside teachers who I had as teachers,” Moran said. “It’s interesting because you see a place that you’re familiar with in a whole new light and you have new respect for people who you’ve known for a relatively long time because you get to see behind the scenes what they do, and do it yourself. That’s just a really cool part of being back for sure.”

Finberg noted her own swift reversal of roles but expressed a readiness to join the ranks of her previous educators.

“It’s kind of funny to be on the other side of things so quickly,” said Finberg, who graduated from the high school she’s now teaching in just five years ago. “But above all, this experience so far has confirmed everything I thought I knew — that this is a place full of people who genuinely care and who just want the best for everyone that comes through this school and so I just feel lucky to be a part of that.”