St. Rose Normal School was founded in 1890 by the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration, and what would become Viterbo University has been well known and respected for excellence and innovation in teacher education ever since. Viterbo has graduated thousands of top-notch teachers through the years. Meet four who are truly making a difference in their profession and the lives of their students.

Cadi Stricklin ’16

Although she was still in elementary school when her family moved from Onalaska way up north to Phillips, Catherine “Cadi” Stricklin ’16 already had made up her mind about college.

“Viterbo was the school where I always wanted to go,” said Stricklin, who is starting her sixth year teaching at Blessed Sacrament Elementary. “Viterbo and La Crosse have always had a place in my heart.”

She was just as sure about what she wanted to do as a vocation. “I’ve always wanted to be a teacher, to make a difference in students’ lives,” Stricklin said.

And she does make a difference, said her former principal at Blessed Sacrament, Kay Berra, who now is a program coordinator for the Viterbo School of Education.

“She was an outstanding teacher from the start,” Berra said of Stricklin. “She was passionate about education but more importantly passionate about the well-being of her students and holding them to a higher standard of moral character.”

Berra said she was always impressed with the extra effort Stricklin put out, wherever it was needed but especially the time, care, and compassion Stricklin has given to two girls who lost their mother to cancer the year Stricklin started at Blessed Sacrament.

“The hours of time and effort Cadi has put in with these girls is the kind of thing Viterbo is known for,” Berra said. “I am sure I don’t know the half of what Cadi does for and with these two young ladies, but she still has a relationship with them as they move to middle and high school.”

“I could never be their mom, but I could support them in any way possible,” said Stricklin, who lives in De Soto with her husband, Ken.

Being there for those two students naturally grows out of Stricklin’s approach to education, which centers on creating strong connections in the classroom.

“You have to know the students, build relationships, and build community in your classroom,” said Stricklin, who this year is teaching writing and language arts to third and fourth graders. “It doesn’t happen overnight. It takes an investment of time. Communication is the key to being a good educator. It doesn’t start with homework.”

Stricklin worked in schools for more than a decade before she was able to start her training to fulfill her teaching dream. Becoming a teacher took a major investment of time and effort from Stricklin.

When she started taking classes at Viterbo, she was living in Prairie du Chien, working as a special education paraprofessional, and caring for her now-grown sons, Spencer and Quinton, who were 10 and 8 years old when she started at Viterbo.

Stricklin said Viterbo was the perfect place for a non- traditional undergraduate student like her to fulfill her educational goal. Beyond offering a class schedule that works for working people with families, Viterbo had small classes and professors as committed to connecting with students as she is.

“Viterbo’s professors were really vested in the students,” said Stricklin, who majored in elementary education with a minor in early childhood education. “I felt as though I really had a relationship with every one of my professors. I think that’s huge, when you’re not a number, you’re a person. Viterbo was a great experience for me.”

Karla Lawrence ’99, ’01

Even starting her 23rd year of teaching, Karla (Hammes) Lawrence ’99, ’01, still gets excited when a new school year is about to start, but it’s not like she remembers her first year of teaching, fresh out of Viterbo and ready to take on the world.

“That first year of teaching was so exciting,” Lawrence said. “I wish I could have bottled up all that energy and enthusiasm.”

Growing up on a farm in Barre Mills, Lawrence excelled at math and science when she was going to school in West Salem. Her choice of college was easy after a nun from her church, St. Leo’s Catholic Church, showed her around the Viterbo campus.

“Her taking me there honestly made me love Viterbo and the campus,” she said.

Lawrence made a lifelong friend on campus even before her first class. Standing in line to register, she struck up

a conversation with a young woman from Westby. She and Erin (Urbanek) Curti ’99, now a social worker for La Crosse County, decided they should share a dorm room.

She considered majoring in nursing but settled on education, a field in which she has been able to have a big impact in the lives of young people. “I don’t know how you could find as much fulfillment doing anything else,” she said.

After graduating magna cum laude with her education degree (and math and science minors), Lawrence jumped right into her teaching career as a sixth-grade science teacher at La Crosse’s Logan Middle School. Within two years, she had completed work on an education master’s degree at Viterbo in addition to launching her teaching career.

These days, she’s teaching sixth-grade math and science at Logan Middle. Mathematics, she has found, has one big advantage over science: With math, there’s always a definite answer to a question.

No matter the subject being taught, Lawrence emphasizes that a teacher’s role goes way beyond helping students learn facts. It’s about helping them become successful adults, and that takes really connecting with students, building relationships with them and their families.

“You do your best to help them grow, not only academically, but socially and emotionally,” said Lawrence, who was honored as a La Crosse area Top Notch Teacher for March 2020. “You have to believe in the students and make sure they know you believe in them before they become dedicated to learning. How do you get to that? You have to have conversations with them and let them know you’re there for them every day.”

That connection with students is so important to Lawrence and a big part of the reason why after teaching sixth-grade science for 14 years she switched to elementary school. Teaching middle school, she’d have 75–100 students per day in her classroom, but when she moved to La Crosse’s Northside Elementary she had 25.

For Lawrence, the key part of every day at Northside Elementary was the morning meeting, a time for getting to know students, building relationships, and getting everybody in the mindset to learn. “That’s precious time. That morning group becomes a pretty tight group,” she said. “Everybody’s going through different things in their lives.”

After four years at Northside, she moved back to Logan Middle School to teach sixth-grade math, bringing with her the lessons she learned from working with the younger kids.

“Right when kids get to school, they need to feel loved,” Lawrence said. “Yes, they come to school to learn, but they’re not going to learn unless they feel valued and loved.”

Quartell Roberson ’10

It makes sense that when Quartell Roberson ’10 became a teacher, he would want to help those who might otherwise fall through the cracks. Every day growing up he was close to a great example of someone who is all about caring for others: his mother.

Through the years, Roberson’s mother, Gloria, has worked in home health care, nursing homes, and hospice, always doing work that involved looking out for people who are having a hard time. It couldn’t help but rub off on him.

From the time he was in sixth grade at a predominantly white school in Rockford, Ill., Roberson knew he wanted to be a teacher. That mission/ambition was solidified by another influential educator, this one an eighth-grade social studies teacher in Alaska.

Yes, Alaska.

And after Alaska, Roberson’s family moved to Florida for a time before settling in La Crosse for most of his high school years. Roberson played football and basketball at La Crosse Central, a “quiet kid” who nevertheless showed leadership in the athletic realm.

Roberson served in the U.S. Air Force before returning to La Crosse to start his education as a teacher, first at Western Technical College before transferring to Viterbo, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in broad field social studies.

After doing substitute teaching in the La Crosse area for a time after graduation, he got his first job back at Central High School in 2013 as a teaching assistant helping kids on in-school suspension. This was in Roberson’s wheelhouse, and he was inspired to earn a certificate in alternative education, a springboard to his work as lead teacher in Central’s alternative school, LaCrossroads.

“That was my dream job. My goal was working with at- risk students. I wanted to help kids who were not on track to graduate and be someone who they knew would be there for them,” Roberson said.

As the LaCrossroads lead program teacher, Roberson would teach the elective classes and social studies, with other teachers coming in for English, science, and math classes. More importantly, he was the one they could count on to make sure they kept moving toward graduation.

“If they showed up, I would make sure they graduated,” he said.

While working in the classroom, Roberson also has been teaching lessons on football fields and basketball courts for many years, coaching everything from recreation league teams to high school. He was an assistant coach for the Central boys basketball team, becoming head coach of the Central girls basketball team in 2017.

“Our coaching philosophy is we want to coach you to be better people, not just better players,” he said. “And I tell parents, ‘I want your daughter to leave this program with a voice. We want them to understand that their voice matters.’”

Whether it’s in the classroom or on the court, Roberson sees the core of his job as building relationships. While he learned a lot about being a teacher at Viterbo, his adeptness at building relationships came from his life experiences. Moving to Alaska, then Florida, then La Crosse, Roberson had to adapt to new surroundings and make new friends. In the Air Force, the people he worked together with came from a wide variety of backgrounds and mindsets.

One of Roberson’s biggest takeaways from his time at Viterbo was the servant leadership emphasis on the importance of working for the common good. “We have to be thinking about the larger community, getting out in the community and taking care of folks,” he said.

Last December, after six years with LaCrossroads, Roberson took on a role with the La Crosse School District serving a larger community. He is a family and cultural connections coordinator (also known as a cultural liaison).

He struggled with leaving behind a job where he could play a major role in helping turn young people’s lives around. But he sees opportunity to make an impact in his new role, too. “I get to build relationships with a lot more kids,” he said.

Ben DiSera ’13

Growing up in Hayward, Ben DiSera ’13 dreamed of following his father into the aviation business and becoming a pilot. As he got closer to graduating from high school and charting his educational and career path, though, he realized that flying was an interest, but music was a passion.

DiSera loved his musical adventures in high school choir and band, and his choir director, Georgi Edgington, was particularly inspiring. “She was a really good teacher, a great mentor, and then a friend,” he said. “I thought teaching music might be something I’d want to do so I could give students the same opportunities and experiences I had in high school.”

In a poetic twist of fate, DiSera is teaching music, directing choirs, and serving as head track coach at Hayward High School, the place where he set his goal of becoming a high school choir director and track coach.

He was teaching in Duluth when the Hayward school superintendent recruited him to take over for Edgington, who had enthusiastically recommended DiSera be hired as her successor when she was preparing to leave the high school after 25 years as choir director.

As he prepared to begin his seventh year as a teacher, DiSera reflected on the lessons he learned from his Viterbo teachers.

“I feel like I was pretty well prepared for real-world teaching,” DiSera said. “You never really fully understand what you’re getting yourself into until you’re actually doing it, but I feel like the professors I had, Nancy Allen [’84] especially, talked about the logistics of the profession, not just teaching music. Even though you can’t get fully prepared for that by being told about it, being told about it has really helped.”

DiSera distinctly remembers Allen teaching about the importance of being a “reflective practitioner” as a teacher. “You get back from your students what you give to them,” he said. “I always try to look at myself and ask, ‘Did I give them my best performance?’”

Most likely he did. That’s how he rolls.

“As a teacher, I’ve changed and grown because I realize how many different hats a teacher has to wear,” DiSera said. “I’m not just teaching people how to sing or read music or how to work together as a group. That’s part of the job description, but you’re teaching them life skills: how to communicate with each other, how to work together to reach goals, how to build their confidence.”

DiSera keeps plenty busy between his duties as choral director and track coach, and he supervises the school’s weight room when it’s not track season. His teachers at Viterbo wouldn’t be surprised that he could handle having a lot on his plate.

In one semester his junior year at Viterbo, he took 20 credits (including a time-consuming choir class), was a residence hall RA, ran track, and performed in an opera.

For one Saturday track meet in Iowa, DiSera drove his car instead of taking the team bus so that he could leave right after his events to make it back to Viterbo in time for his opera role.

Although he’s still early in his teaching career, DiSera already has had a student who went to college to study music education tell him that it was because of him that the student wanted to become a music teacher. “That was a really cool full-circle experience for me,” he said.

For another student, DiSera helped him discover that music could be a creative outlet that can make things better when life gets tough. And life was tough for that student. His mother had left him with his grandparents because she couldn’t care for him. For a while, the student was living out of his car and in danger of dropping out of school.

“Music was his niche, where he felt like he belonged,” DiSera said. “He’s a real neat kid, and he’s found joy in sharing his work with me. One of the hats I wear for this student is basically a father figure.”

The practice he’s had at being a father figure for students should come in handy for DiSera. At the time of the interview, he and his wife, Stephanie, were expecting to bring their first child into the world in a matter of weeks.