Sierra Fichialos, Granger High School
Oct 8, 2025, 1:34 PM | Updated: Oct 23, 2025, 2:24 pm
“With Parent/Teacher Conferences a couple of weeks ago, I just had to nominate Sierra Fichialos again. Ms. Fichialos has one of the most challenging positions for a high school teacher. She teaches reading to general education students at Granger High School, and has done so for the past 10 years.
Since school started about a month ago, Ms. Fichialos has assessed her students’ reading levels, needs, and interests, and has created lessons to help them to become more confident, proficient readers. Ms. Fichialos is looking forward to conferences this week because she sees it as an opportunity to meet with parents to go over their students’ progress, successes, and challenges. She loves seizing every opportunity to support her students’ learning and celebrate their successes!
So many students reach high school unable to read on grade level for many reasons, but no matter the reasons, students who reach high school reading well-below grade level face academic challenges, and often have a more negative attitude about school because of these difficulties.
Clearly, Ms. Fichialos’s position as a reading teacher is immeasurably important. Ms. Fichialos takes on the insurmountable task of teaching the most struggling, most resistant students how to read, and she does this with so much passion and dedication. She knows that, for many of these students, this is their last opportunity to gain this necessary skill.
People read every day in every situation, and if students leave high school without this skill, they will be unable to complete many daily, real-world tasks. Ms. Fichialos knows this and makes it her mission to not only teach students how to read, but to help them find things they enjoy reading and learn to love it. She goes to library sales and purchases books with her own money so that she can provide a variety of books for her students, and at the end of the year when she trades out the books, she gives them to the students so they have books at home.
Ms. Fichialos begins poring over student data well before the school year begins so that she is able to create lessons catered to her students’ individualized needs. She also works to develop lessons that help to incentivize students to read entire books and complete the corresponding assignments. Many of her students have never read a book all the way through, so being able to create lessons that help students complete a book is unbelievably important.
Ms. Fichialos never gives up on her students – no matter how deficient or resistant – and works tirelessly to help them to be prepared for their other high school classes, and for life after high school. I truly can’t think of a teacher with a more important and more challenging position than Ms. Fichialos.”
-Mary Winters
About Teacher Features on KSL NewsRadio
Teachers are the backbone of our community, and at KSL NewsRadio, we want to highlight the hard work they put in to help their students.
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