Getting to know Laura Colliver and Laura Alyssa Platé

Called to the Classroom

by Mitzi Ethridge-Cantrell, pastoral care associate

Frederick Buechner once wrote that “the place God calls you is to the place where your deepest gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” If you spend time with two of our congregation’s teachers long enough, you begin to understand exactly what he meant.

Laura Colliver and Laura Alyssa Platé are educators at opposite ends of the K-12 spectrum—one shaping the hearts and minds of elementary students, the other walking alongside high school seniors as they step into adulthood. However, in a recent conversation, one quickly recognizes that both women approach the classroom not merely as professionals, but as women who have been called. Their work, in essence, is a ministry.

Finding the Call

If you ask how they decided to become teachers, you will find their stories are as different as the students they teach. Laura Colliver comes from a long line of educators; her grandparents were teachers as well as her mother and aunts and uncles.  She spent years trying to find a different path. “God shut doors where I thought I was going,” she shared. “But my education classes were the ones that were most comfortable.” After pursuing various alternatives, she realized “No, this is what I need to be doing,” and settled into teaching.

Laura Alyssa’s journey took a different path. School was her safe space and teaching was always in the back of her mind, regardless of the number of possible professions that attracted her. “My teachers were always the people I trusted and went to,” she said. “And there were definitely some really important teachers in my life. I wanted to be able to give back to the community the way they poured into me.” By seventh grade, Laura Alyssa had made up her mind:  She was not only committed to being a teacher, she started being one, teaching Sunday school to second graders in her previous church.

It’s interesting to note that both ladies began their teaching lives in church. Long before they taught for a salary, they were already nurturing children in the community. The sacred and the vocational were never really separate for them.

The Ministry of Knowing Your Students

When asked how they blend teaching and ministry, both women acknowledged the importance of relationships. “When you think of the way Jesus’ ministry was really about building relationships and knowing the person,’ Laura reflected, “that’s really critical to being an effective teacher. Knowing your students wholly and completely and caring for them wholly and completely is really the only way to make a lasting impact.”

For Laura Alyssa, who teaches economics and personal finance to seniors at the high school level, the content itself becomes a gateway to deeper conversations. Helping 18- year-olds build a budget, file their taxes for the first time, or think realistically about the future opens doors to thoughtful dialogue. “It allows those deeper conversations to come around as well,” she said. Because of her accessibility and willingness to listen, she is often thought of as “big sister” – a safe adult to whom one could talk, who is similar to those who shaped her life when she was young.

But she is quick to acknowledge, “You can’t be that kind of person and hold on to those things without a strong faith, because it is too much.” She grounds herself daily in scripture, prayer and in her church community—not as a supplement to her work, but as the very source that makes her work possible. “You can’t pour from an empty cup,” she said. “God has to walk with me through that.”

A Quiet Faith

For both women, their faith is reflected in the classroom in unique ways. Laura Colliver shared that when she was a homeroom teacher, she would pray for each student by name and those were her best days. Since then, she has moved from a homeroom teacher to a STEM teacher and currently instructs the entire student body, kindergarten to fifth grade. She continues to pray for her students, but with a focus toward her own heart. “If I take time to open myself up and be a vessel for the Spirit to lead me instead of me trying to think I am in control,” she said, “those are the better days.” She keeps a monthly prayer guide on her mirror – a gift from a children’s minister years ago- and prays through it each morning for both her family and her students.

Laura Alyssa leans on Ecclesiastes 3:11, “He makes everything beautiful in its time” as an anchor when the day does not go as planned. When a student needs to talk and the lesson gets set aside, when everything on the schedule gets delayed to make time for a student in crisis, she comes back to that verse. “That was what needed to happen,” she said, simply. Schedules and lesson plans are easily adjusted.

Grace in the Classroom

Both women spoke with deep tenderness about what it means to see children as whole people rather than as performance metrics. When her students get frustrated or upset, Laura Colliver reminds them, “You are more than your worst mistake.” It is a phrase that carries enormous grace—the same grace Christ extends to each of us.

Laura Alyssa put it a different way when describing the joy of watching a struggling  senior make it to graduation: “Seeing the joy on the face is so much more rewarding to me than seeing the joy on a kid whom we never had to worry about.”

That is the heart of a teacher who is also a minister—one who rejoices over the one who was nearly lost.

An Invitation

As a congregation, we are called to uphold those who do this work. Teachers carry far more than we realize, and they carry it largely in silence, bound by trust, by confidentiality, by love for children whose stories are not theirs to share. As Laura Alyssa reminded us, “Just because you ask a teacher how their week was and they say, ‘Oh, it was great!’ doesn’t mean that there wasn’t hard stuff.”

Investing in the life of a child is, as Laura Colliver puts it, investing in your community. And these two women – faithful, funny, honest and deeply rooted in their calling – are doing just that, one student at a time.

This year, as our students head back to school, remember those who stand before them, who see their profession as more than a job, but as a calling. May we pray for our teachers as a new school year begins. May we see them. And may we be grateful that God still calls people to the place where their deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.