The history of the United States is a boring subject for most students, but those who take Mrs. Bevacqua’s class at Lakeland High School are anything but bored.
Between Bevacqua’s charismatic energy and comedic lectures, history has gone from boring to engaging.
Colleen Bevacqua primarily teaches U.S. history to the juniors and seniors at LHS. She teaches the high school level Modern U.S. class as well as the dual-credit college level U.S. History.
Bevacqua also teaches a dual-credit physical education weightlifting class that takes place after school hours.
She graduated from the University of Idaho with her undergrad and graduate work, and she is able to teach any of the social sciences and the health class at LHS.
She has taught for twenty-two years, and all twenty-two of them have been at LHS
When choosing what she wanted to teach, she had a bit of a struggle deciding where she wanted to go.
She graduated from LHS in 1999, and the teachers at both the middle and high schools played a big part in her choosing to pursue teaching.
“At one point, I wanted to be like Colleen Hall and teach Speech and Leadership and English,” said Bevacqua.
She struggled with the reading and memorization aspect of school, so she knew it was something she did not want to pursue, especially after realizing there were high school seniors just a year below her that were far more advanced than she was.
She switched her major to P.E. and health, but dropped the P.E. part, again because of memorization. Plus, her experience in athletic training let her know that dealing with smelly kids was not something she enjoyed.
Bevacqua loved social sciences, history, and politics, so she steered herself in that direction, choosing to teach history to high schoolers.
“I have loved it ever since,” Bevacqua said.
Her mission as a teacher is to make sure her students appreciate the “why” behind history and to hopefully get them involved in politics when they come of age.
She wants her students to appreciate what the people before us have gone through in order for the country to be where it is today.
“I want them to appreciate what it has taken for people before us to give us the rights and freedoms that we all sometimes take for granted,” Bevacqua said.
Aside from teaching, Bevacqua used to coach softball. She coached the varsity team for seventeen years, but ended up retiring because she had two children. Now, she helps her husband out with the off-season workouts for the varsity baseball team.
Bevacqua also runs Idaho Drug Free Youth (IDFY), something she is very passionate about.
“I just think that it’s just really important for people to realize how bad substance abuse can be, and I don’t want to see any of our students or people that they care about head down that path,” she said.
Bevacqua said that she loves Lakeland. She did her student teaching at Lake City High School, which is a larger school, and coached at Potlatch High School, a really small school, during college, and after experiencing both, Lakeland is the perfect size for her.
“It’s not too big but it’s not too small, and so there’s opportunities for students, but it’s not so big that it’s overwhelming” she said.
Bevacqua also said that she loves her students, and that she thinks Lakeland has the best of the bunch.