Yollande Gottlieb has spent her entire twenty-seven year teaching career at the Walt Disney Magnet School. She currently teaches fifth grade.

Yollande is an outstanding educator and a model practitioner of project-based learning, the focus of our Teacher Incentive Grant program. She is also an extremely effective educational grant writer, having won grants from every educational foundation in Chicago, including four from the Oppenheimer Family Foundation. In addition to writing her own grants, she mentors and encourages other educators to apply for grants.

Yollande leads many workshops where she shares her non-stop enthusiasm and creative ideas. She has served on the Teacher Advisory Board of the Chicago Foundation for Education and Art Resources in Teaching.

Her seemingly boundless energy extends to her community including her synagogue, the Park District, the Oppenheimer Family Foundation and, especially, to her family which is her number one concern. “My family comes before everything.”