LINDSEY DEPENBROCK: The Power of the Pen

It’s been a productive career already for Northern Elementary’s Lindsey Depenbrock and she’s not even 30 years old.

A budding children’s book author, the fourth-grade teacher has manuscripts for three picture books and a middle-school book. Now that she’s completed work for her national boards, she will polish the books and send them to publishers.

“The creative outlet is relaxing. I would stay up all night working on them because I enjoyed it so very much,” she said.

She will attend a national book festival in Washington, D.C. and is working on the ability to Skype with her students from the festival.

Another creative outlet for Depenbrock is the dulcimer. Every year she teaches her students classics such as “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” and “This Old Man,” which the children play at a schoolwide talent show.

Along with those creative outlets, Depenbrock also is bilingual, having double majored as an undergraduate in education and Spanish. That skill serves her well with her ESL and bilingual students, and especially their parents.

Depenbrock made her mark as an innovator at Northern with a project that came to her while struggling to connect with a difficult class a few years ago.

On a field trip to the Lexington Children’s Theatre, the school bus stopped by a Lexington college and her kids watched a parade of college students walk by.

When she explained that they were looking at a college, the kids starting oohing and aahing, saying, “That’s awesome.”

That inspired her to initiate a college day at the school. She invited members of a local university to the campus to introduce the idea of college to her students, most of whom come from families with no history of college attendance. One university official wore traditional graduation robes that dazzled the young students.

A year later, she took the entire fourth grade to a college campus where selected Northern students read their essays “What College
Means to Me.”

“It brought tears to my eyes,” Principal Meredith Ramage said. “Lindsey had painted a picture of college so that these kids could picture themselves going someday. It was so cool.”