By Curtis Baker, JRN 111 Student

Sometimes, one moment can change a person’s path. That moment came for Lara Hernandez Corkrey when she began teaching freshman writing as a way to pay for her master’s degree at Northern Illinois University.

“The moment I stepped into that classroom, I thought this is it. This is everything I ever wanted,” she says. “I knew I specifically wanted to teach first-year students. It changed everything.”

Since that moment, Moraine Valley’s 2024 Master Educator of the Year has made it her purpose and her passion to teach first-year college students. 

Hernandez Corkrey, who is a professor, department chair for developmental education, and coordinator of developmental communications, has been at Moraine Valley since 2011.

If you ask her, she will humbly tell you, “This is the best job in the whole world at the best school in the whole world. Moraine Valley is the best place to work.”  

In her own way, she is changing lives in the education world like nobody from her past would have predicted.

Coming from a hard-working family, Hernandez Corkrey was born in Long Island, New York, but she doesn’t call that place home. When she was young, her family moved around the East Coast, eventually coming to Chicago for her father’s job.

 “If you ask where I’m from, I say Chicago with a Chicago accent,” she said.

Her New York relatives still aren’t fans of the move, as even to this day they still jokingly ask about her farm and her make-believe tractor.

When she was young, Hernandez Corkrey lost her father to cancer. The loss forced her now-single mother to take over the family software programming company. From that point on, her mother implanted a rule.

“We were going to college no matter what,” she said. “And when you watch your single mother working so hard for your college education, you don’t take it for granted. And she was right, it changed everything.” 

“We were going to college no matter what. And when you watch your single mother working so hard for your college education, you don’t take it for granted. And she was right it, changed everything.” 

Lara Hernandez Corkrey

She decided to become a business major, following in her father’s entrepreneurial footsteps. That was, until she realized she was horrible at business. A professor once told her to her face that she would have to start the whole class over because she was so behind. 

She went to tell her mom about her horrible grades and how she was not going to do anything with business, and hilariously, her mom said, “Of course you’re not. You’re terrible at it.”

Dropping the business idea, she discovered her love for teaching and has made quite an impact for the rest of her life. She obtained a degree from Northern Illinois University and had no clue what to do with it. She decided to stay and get her master’s degree in developmental education. 

She finished her college career at the University of Kansas, where she was also a graduate teaching assistant. Despite KU’s reputation for basketball, she never attended a game while she was there.

“Even though I technically was a student, I was also a teacher, so you think I was going to go sit in the student section with my students?” she said.

As she was finishing there, one of the professors there was trying to help her get job interviews at different universities. When the professor asked her what she wanted to teach, she said, “I want to teach freshmen.”

The woman replied, “You never will. Any university that hires you will never put you in front of a freshman class. You’re going to teach grad students. They wouldn’t waste you on freshmen.”

Hernandez Corkrey decided that if a university wouldn’t take her, she would try her luck with community colleges. She has taught at a few, including Elgin Community College, College of Dupage, and here at Moraine Valley, as well as at four year schools such as North Central College.

Even though she ended up at Moraine Valley, Hernandez Corkrey was slightly tempted to take the jobs that her high-level degrees called for. Those temptations didn’t last very long, though, as her passion to help the specific group of students took over. 

“I have been very well educated, and I take all that privilege and I focus solely on the students who are most at risk and most underprepared, and I don’t regret any bit of it,” she said.

“I have been very well educated, and I take all that privilege and I focus solely on the students who are most at risk and most underprepared, and I don’t regret any bit of it.”

Lara Hernandez Corkrey

Hernandez Corkrey also takes just as much pride in supporting the students she has taught even after they have left her class. 

“I heard from a student recently who is about to graduate,” she said. “She wanted to know if I would be at graduation. At all the graduations, I try to sit in the front row. If I see a former student, I make a scene, and I don’t care.”

On top of all the powerful impacts she has made on so many people, one accomplishment stands out: the 2024 Master Educator award she recently received. 

The reason for this award was because she was ironically working on a project to help students avoid taking her college class. She is working with area high schools to set up a course that seniors in high school can take. If they pass it, they would be able to bypass developmental writing and reading courses in college and go straight into a COM 101 class. 

When she pitched the idea, some people wondered why she would want to put herself out of a job.

“It is my obligation to help them get to COM 101,” she said. “In a test run we did for four years at a local high school, the senior students who took that class and passed and went onto COM 101 had an 80 percent pass rate, which is fantastic.”

Based on her work, she was nominated by her dean, Michael Morsches, who collaborated with her office mate, Jennifer Lee-Good. They wrote a nomination letter talking about Hernandez Corkrey’s tireless work to get this project off the ground and to the point where it is now. 

After winning the award–for which she had no idea she was even nominated– Hernandez Corkrey was thrilled but also thankful. 

“The stuff that’s happening here is just at a higher level than anything I have ever heard of. My reaction to winning was ‘Are you sure? Me?’ I was overwhelmed. I really was, but that’s one of the things about being a teacher at a community college is that you can really focus on your teaching.” 

She has tried to do a very special thing and will continue to do so for the sake of her students. 

“This is what I tell my students all the time,” she said. “You can do this, you may not be doing it yet, but you are capable of it.” 

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PHOTO COURTESY OF LARA HERNANDEZ CORKREY