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Winter 2008                                                                  Back to Spotlight home page

Alumni profile: Tiffany Nickel

A silver lining

Like many first-year teachers, Tiffany Nickel (BSE 1995) was bursting with enthusiasm. When she started teaching in the fall of 1996 at El Dorado Middle School, she was ready to inspire students. She was ready to change their lives. Eight days into that school year, it was her life that changed.

Over the Labor Day weekend, Nickel dove head-first into a pool and broke her neck at the fifth vertebrae. Suddenly, she was quadriplegic. Yet the devastating injury and long recovery could not break Nickel’s enthusiasm for life or for teaching.

“It wasn’t going to be taken from me,” she said, describing her rush to get back to the classroom and her students. “They were my inspiration. That was my goal, to get back to school. I had students waiting for me. I couldn’t sit around in a hospital.”

Nickel is still close to those students from 1996, and still embraces a remarkable perspective on life. By the fall of 1997, she was back in the classroom, and today she teaches at Jackson Elementary School in Wichita. She works with third-, fourth- and fifth-graders with special needs, and the youngsters with learning and emotional disabilities are surely blessed to be around someone who understands their struggles. When they have difficulty with a math problem, Nickel tells them about tying her shoes, and explains that there are different ways to solve a problem. “There always seems to be a silver lining,” she said.

After her accident, no one told Nickel she couldn’t live independently or couldn’t teach. Her students often arrive with the burden of having been told they aren’t good enough. From day one, she empowers them as her “helpers” in the classroom, assigning tasks that she can’t readily perform. “I tell them from the beginning that I’m their biggest advocate, I’m their biggest supporter, I’m their biggest fan,” Nickel said. 

She may also be their busiest advocate, supporter and fan. Nickel is the president of Wheelchair Sports, Inc., an organization devoted to helping persons with physical disabilities live social and competitive lifestyles, and also executive director of the Kansas Disability Coalition. She’s involved in her community in a variety of ways, including a post on the Wichita/Sedgwick County Advisory Board to help make the area friendlier to people with disabilities.

The importance of one-on-one relationships with students – knowing their parents’ names, their siblings’ names – is something Nickel picked up from her professors in ESU’s Teachers College. She recognized that they were lifelong learners, always adaptable.  “I learned about the love of learning,” she said. “I learned how to apply, differentiate and modify methods of learning for students of disability.”

With a decade of teaching under her belt, Nickel is surprised by one thing – “the number of hours it truly takes to be good – good enough you can sleep at night.” She’s also aware of the back-and-forth nature of special education. First it’s considered best to place students with disabilities in regular classrooms, then it shifts to the opinion that specialized, outside instruction is more beneficial. Like her life-changing accident, Nickel has learned to handle life as it comes, and handle it with a bit of humor. When  things change, “You take them running,” she said. “Or in my case, wheeling.”

Last Updated April 17, 2008