These two Pitt-Johnstown alumni prove the power of teaching

Amy Arcurio never planned to attend Pitt-Johnstown. She was studying at the Pittsburgh campus when her father was diagnosed with cancer and lost his job, forcing her to return home to Cambria County.

Nicole Kuzmiak always planned on attending Pitt-Johnstown, lured away from her hometown of Indiana, Pennsylvania, by her friends’ glowing reviews of the regional campus.

Despite taking different paths, both women — both education majors — benefited from Pitt-Johnstown’s small class sizes and nurturing professors. And the community they found there is one they’ve tried to emulate in their respective school districts.

Arcurio (UPJ ’90) began her career in the child welfare system and took the lessons she learned there into the classroom. Today, she’s the superintendent of the Greater Johnstown School District, where many of her students face socioeconomic challenges. “It doesn’t define them,” she says. “It’s a variable, but we won’t allow it to determine what they become or who they can be.”

She helped to champion an initiative that allows Greater Johnstown students to earn an associate’s degree while still in high school. Students who otherwise may not have been able to afford four years of college can now become college graduates.

“We’re giving families the opportunity to change the trajectory of their lives,” she says.

Meanwhile, Kuzmiak (UPJ ’97), who serves as principal of Westmont Hilltop Elementary School in Johnstown, is working alongside her alma mater to build a college-to-classroom pipeline. She is a regular visitor to the student teacher seminar class and takes “as many student teachers as they’ll give me” each year. She’s gone on to hire several of them at her school and recommend more throughout her district.

“It’s a privilege to get a student teacher in the building and begin building that relationship,” she says. And given the commonwealth’s current demand for teachers, it’s also “an honor and a testament to that relationship when they say yes.”