Vermont Teacher Forgivable Loan Program helps Hannah Jenkins become an art teacher
This story was originally published by VTDigger on March 26, 2025
As a junior at South Burlington High School, Hannah Jenkins, who uses she/they pronouns, signed up for the healthcare program at Burlington Tech Center, thinking she might go into nursing. When her advisor told her she wouldn’t be able to take chorus since the bus wouldn’t get her back to campus in time, it was almost a deal-breaker.
“I told her ‘absolutely not.’ I am not giving up chorus,” Hannah recalls. “I insisted on it. I said, I’ll be 10 minutes late to class, but I am not giving that up.”
Her strong love of music—and of the arts in general—ended up being a helpful guidepost when she realized, because of those early courses, that nursing wasn’t the right fit.
“While I decided not to pursue nursing, I knew I wanted to help others,” says Hannah, for whom that early discovery was helpful, but left her feeling adrift as she started her senior year at South Burlington. “Then I got into a rant with someone about all the reasons I didn’t appreciate the education system as a student. They said, ‘then why don’t you become a teacher?’” That conversation made Hannah pause and reflect, and eventually, agree.
Until that conversation, college wasn’t on Hannah’s radar. She had watched her older siblings make their ways in the world, seeing her oldest brother go to college for engineering and her older sister move up in the working world without a degree. Since Hannah didn’t know what she wanted to do, but knew she could work hard, she planned to follow her sister’s path.
“I knew college was really expensive, and to me it was not something I could do if I didn’t know how I would use it,” says Hannah.
After realizing that teaching would offer her a sustainable way to continue to pursue music—and that path required a college degree—she decided, at the last minute, to apply.
“Plus, after COVID, I really needed to get out of the house,” says Hannah, who graduated from high school in the spring of 2021. “I decided I’d go to college, and if it clicks, it clicks.”
College definitely clicked for Hannah, who is now working toward not one, but two degrees from the Johnson campus of Vermont State University. She expects to graduate in spring 2026 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a bachelor’s in K-12 art education.
