Miller Middle School Extended Learning Program (XLP) Teacher Ann Jackson brings a unique passion to her role facilitating the National History Day (NHD) program there, and this year, she is among 78 nominees from across the U.S. — and the only one from Iowa — for the National NHD Teacher of the Year award.

Jackson, who has spent the last 10 years at Miller, said NHD allows students to learn about a wide variety of stories and gain exposure to history in a different way beyond the basic details.

“It focuses more on, or it can focus more on individual people’s stories, and it can really go in any direction that the student’s interested in. If the student’s interested in sports or music or art or whatever, they can choose that topic and then pursue it,” she said. “So I really like that part of it. It teaches those historical thinking skills in any topic area that fits the student’s passion.”

This year has been particularly successful for Marshalltown Community School District (MCSD) NHD students as a total of 15 are headed to the national competition in Maryland between Miller and Marshalltown High School (MHS). One aspect that Jackson loves is the wide range of topics, which have ranged from the history of lobotomies to the Armenian genocide to Ukrainian independence.

“Really, anything can just get us going in a direction where they can be successful. It’s fantastic,” Jackson said.

Some of the projects have been much more locally focused, profiling Adrian “Cap” Anson and, more recently, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids on Swift, which is now known as JBS. Another tangentially related school project Jackson leads is research into the people buried on the Iowa Veterans Home (IVH) grounds — one turned out to be a freed slave who fought in the Civil War and had a grandson who became a Tuskegee Airman.

She even brings in items of her own father’s, who served in the Vietnam War himself and eventually moved to IVH, in a “history mystery” before sharing his identity with her students.

“As the kids make those discoveries, they just get excited and want to learn more, and I think that kind of encapsulates the history day process,” she said. “They pick a topic, and as they find out, they want to learn more. They want to ask more questions.”

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Contact Robert Maharry at 641-753-6611 ext. 255 or

maharry@timesrepublican.com.