May 12, 2017
By JAMES EVANS
Rutherford County Schools
Riverdale’s Edie Urness-Pondillo has been awarded a Tennessee Education Association’s Distinguished Classroom Teacher award for 2017.
Pondillo is only the second Rutherford County teacher to earn the award in the past 20 years, she said. Teacher Allen Nichols previously won the award, she added.
“One of the characteristics that sets me apart from fellow teachers is one that came from a disastrous freshman year in college — I have been a failure in school and know the frustrations of struggling to keep up with my classmates,” Urness-Pondillo wrote in her application she completed to be considered for the award.
After her unsuccessful first year in college, Urness-Pondillo said she "fled" and became a newspaper reporter for 10 years covering the education beat.
"I was drawn to education by what I saw in the schools — both positive and negative. Teaching became my calling and I went back to college to earn my teaching degree," she said.
Urness-Pondillo — a past Rutherford County Schools district-level Teacher of the Year — was honored with other TEA award winners on May 5 at a reception at Embassy Suites in Murfreesboro.
She began her teaching career in Tennessee in 2000 at Smyrna High School and transferred to Riverdale in 2006 where she teaches English.