Noah Fedida
Photo of Nikki Derdzinske.
In 2023, Ms. Nikki Derdzinske became the LACES Magnet Coordinator. Previously, she was the AP English Literature and Composition teacher, Middle School College and Career Coach, and advisor to the journalism class at LACES. She started at LACES in 2006 and attended the University of California, Santa Cruz for her Bachelors’ and Teaching Degrees. But teaching was never supposed to be a full-time job for Derdzinske.
“I had just graduated college, and I needed a job, so I became a substitute teacher because I wanted to stay in Santa Cruz,” said Derdzinske.
After some time as a substitute, she returned to her passion of editing, and started an internship with an independent publishing company here in Los Angeles. But she soon realized that she was not cut out for the independent publishing world. Instead, she got her teaching credential at the UC Santa Cruz, just to have a fall-back option.
“I decided I should go get a teaching credential because it’s always a handy thing to have,” said Derdzinske.
She started teaching in Oakland and discovered her love for it. She taught in the Bay Area for a few years, and then eventually moved to LA with her now-husband. She taught at LACES for 8 years, before undergoing another life change, and then undoing it.
“He [Derdzinske’s husband] got a post out of Maryland, and we moved there and then just life happened and we ended up back here,” said Derdzinske.
For a few years before her transition to magnet coordinator, she worked in an administrative role part of the time and in the classroom the other part of the time.
“I was doing this half the time out of the classroom thing and halftime teacher, which was really delightful,” she said.
For the start of the 2023-2024 school year, she made the full transition to administration, but is still open to going back to teaching.
“I’d spent a long time being department chair and I was like let’s try this and see what it’s like,” said Derdzinske. “I can always go back and teach. I don’t have an administrator credential, and I currently don’t see me going back to school to get one.”
For now, she is staying in the office, but she does miss some of the aspects of the classroom.
“I think the net result is my five and eight-year-old get a lot of time of us reading books and talking about things that they probably don’t care about, but because I do not have an outlet to talk about those things that I think that are interesting,” said Derdzinske.
Education has been a constant in Derdzinske’s life and she now hopes to affect LACES positively from outside the classroom. Still, she wants to impart students with the knowledge that will help them throughout their life. She recommends a few classes to students that will no doubt allow them to be good citizens.