The Northridge High School teacher in her first year at the school recently won a competition that awarded her $50,000 worth of furniture upgrades through a company called KI.

“I’m just used to, like, the basic tables, the basic setup, and so I didn’t even know really differently until I started making my plan and, like, really seeing what was out there,” Obray said.

The features of the upgrade include a new couch, barstools behind the couch, whiteboard tables, new cabinets and a new teacher’s desk.

“I just think it’s, like, life-changing for (the students),” Obray said. “Like, genuinely, even for me, just the way I teach is different now. The way they learn – they’re just way more engaged now than they were a few months ago. It took them a little bit to get used to it, too, but now that they’re more used to it, it’s been really, really cool.”

Grace Watters, Standard-Examiner

Obray is in her third year of teaching overall after teaching for two years at North Layton Junior High.

She teaches just about everything in a contained special education classroom.

“I even teach a skills class,” she said. “So we do, like, cooking. We’ll learn about our emotions in that class. We’ll do, like, fine motor skills in that class. So I teach everything. I teach math, science, English. …

“So, they’re here with me for all core classes and then also that skills class, but they do go out to classes for, like, electives. So if they have seminary, they’ll go to seminary, or if they have yoga – a lot of them really like yoga – or art classes. Things like that. They’ll go out of my class for those elective classes.”

Obray said when she arrived at Northridge, her principal, Tyler Poll, informed her of the competition.

Grace Watters, Standard-Examiner

“And I wasn’t expecting at all for anything to go anywhere,” she said. “Like, literally, I did it because it was fun.”

The application stage was less than ideal, nearly derailing Obray’s involvement. Multiple times she said the program that was used to design her classroom broke. But she decided she really wanted to try it, so she kept at it and was ultimately successful.

She said there were more than 50 submissions from the region she was in, and eventually, she was selected as part of the final three.

Initially, she thought the call notifying her she was a finalist was a scam.

“I submitted it and I was like, ‘I don’t even know what’s going to happen,’ and then I got a phone call one day from I think, like, Illinois, so I wasn’t answering it… but I did,” she said.

Grace Watters, Standard-Examiner

A woman reached out and helped Obray initiate a campaign that would involve getting the word out to vote for her.

At this stage, the desire to win intensified for Obray.

“I’m like, ‘I have support. I have somebody ready to root for me,'” Obray said.

Her students campaigned for her as well.

“I … was like, ‘Oh, their hearts would be broken if we didn’t win,'” she said.

Grace Watters, Standard-Examiner

Also part of the campaign, Obray made a video with her students and submitted it.

Obray found out she won in November and the furniture was delivered in February. Obray was one of four winners overall throughout the country.

“I, in a lot of ways, feel like it’s my first year teaching again because I have totally new students, new systems of doing things,” Obray said. “I’ve never taught high school before, so … that along with this has just been crazy.

“But I think I’m really, really grateful for it right now, too, because I feel like I can start my teaching career essentially with this, with this layout, with this classroom. I think it was a lot, but it was also, like, in a sense the perfect timing for it to happen, too.”

Contact Standard-Examiner editor Ryan Comer at rcomer@standard.net.

Grace Watters, Standard-Examiner