Northwest Professional Educators, a non-union professional educator association, has announced a new board of directors and officers.

President

Bill Proser is founder of the nationally recognized Coeur d’Alene Charter Academy and the academy’s honors literature and economics teacher. Proser’s academy was ranked No. 59 in the nation by the Washington Post and No. 1 in Idaho in the “High School Challenge 2013.”  The academy implements an original college preparatory curriculum, which includes Latin in seventh grade, interdisciplinary history and English classes and accelerated reading of great works. A multi-year fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Proser also served as member of a Coeur d’Alene committee organized to transform a neo-Nazi Aryan Nations compound into a human rights center.

Vice president

Cherri Sabala is an Idaho teacher certification specialist and state coordinator of the

American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence (ABCTE) from Boise. Sabala entered education after a career in the private sector as a business owner, sales professional and entrepreneur. She was an English/language arts teacher at an alternative school in Nampa prior to her current position with ABCTE.

Treasurer

Mikki Nuckols is a reading teacher at Rocky Mountain Middle School in Idaho Falls, and winner of Idaho’s 2007 Milken Educator Award.

Nuckols serves on the State Department of Education Professional Standards Commission and is a

leader in the Idaho Middle Level Association, which awarded her teacher of the year for her region in 2010.  Nuckols also served on the state Teacher Evaluation Task Force.

Secretary

Barbara Amidon of Olympia, Wash., is a recently retired middle school counselor and co-founder of NWPE as a state partner of the Association of American Educators. In the 1990s, Amidon led a statewide effort challenging the Washington Education Association’s (WEA) use of mandatory union dues for politics in a federal class action lawsuit.

Board member

Brad Patzer, Supervision Manager at Idaho Digital Learning Academy and 2003 Idaho Milken Educator, was also re-elected to the board.  Like Nuckols, he has served on the State Department of Ed

ucation Professional Standards Commission and was a member of the State Board of Education’s Online Learning Subcommittee.  Patzer, of Orofino, was a social studies, economics and math teacher at an alternative high school in Rathdrum prior to his current position.