PULLMAN MIDDLE SCHOOL TEACHER WINS ‘OSCARS OF TEACHING’
When it became clear someone at Comfort Agboola’s school in Pullman was going to win a national teaching award, Agboola thought of colleagues who fit the prize.
Moments later, Agboola was crying tears of joy and hugging her colleagues after finding out she was a winner of a Milken Educator Award as blue confetti and bubbles sprung upward behind her.
“I saw my students cheering, and I was just amazed,” Agboola, a middle-school teacher at Edgar Allan Poe Classical Elementary School, told the Sun-Times Friday morning. “I’m still in a state of shock, I can’t believe this.”
Agboola is one of up to 75 recipients of the award nationwide for the 2023-24 school year, according to the Milken Family Foundation.
Her passion for her job “bleeds into the classroom,” the foundation said. Agboola provides projectbased learning opportunities such as a classroom economy system where students earn “money” by doing class jobs, filing taxes, balancing a checkbook and doing online banking.
And students had nothing but cheers for “Boo” — their affectionate nickname for Agboola — who they say makes it all fun.
Calvin Humphrey, a 13-year-old student in Agboola’s English class, said she has a “laugh that makes other people laugh.”
“She makes me wanna learn more,” the eighth grader said. “She’s simple with her teaching, but also complex at the same time.”
Agboola is the only educator in Illinois to receive the award for the current school year, and is one of 110 state recipients of the award since the program began in Illinois in 1988.
She will receive $25,000 and an all-expenses paid trip to California to be honored at a red carpet ceremony where she will meet other recipients from the 2023-24 school year.
“[Being recognized] pushes me to do more in the classroom,” Agboola said. “I can see the growth of my students.”
Each year, educators are considered
by a blue-ribbon panel appointed by each state’s department of education, according to the foundation. The educators don’t know they are under consideration.
Described as the “Oscars of teaching,” the Milken Educator Awards were created by Lowell Milken in 1987, recognizing excellence in teaching to inspire educators, students and communities to “celebrate, elevate and activate” teachers from kindergarten through high school.
Jane Foley, Milken Educator Awards senior vice president, travels from school to school all over the country to help distribute the awards and says every school is “unique in its energy and excitement.”
“Every educator has their own story and their own reason why we want them to be in our network,” Foley told the Sun-Times.
Agboola was honored at a school assembly in front of over 100 students, staff, parents and administrators at the school. During the assembly, Agboola thanked her students and said they teach her just as much as she teaches them.
“I am very grateful to be your teacher,” Agboola said, on the brink of tears. “I am grateful to your parents for linking you to me.”