When Kellee Beachy sees something her students need, she doesn’t tend to wait for someone else to solve it.

That instinct has shaped Kellee’s 13 years at Achievement First and her current role as Multilingual Learning Coordinator at Achievement First Providence Middle School, where she supports a remarkably diverse student body. Of the school’s approximately 400 students, 86 are active multilingual learners.

Kellee’s commitment to those students grew out of an experience early in her career. Before joining Achievement First in 2013, she taught through Teach For America in Phoenix, where she worked with English learners but felt she had never received enough training in how to effectively support them.

Years later, after moving from New Haven to Providence and seeing the growing needs of multilingual learners at her own school, she decided to do something about it: she went back to school herself.

Kellee pursued specialized training at Roger Williams University to become certified in multilingual learning, building expertise she could bring directly back to students and colleagues. She has since earned a second master’s degree in special education as well.

Today, Kellee co-teaches history classes, leads English language development blocks, and coaches history teachers. Her approach is grounded in a simple principle: students learning English should still have access to the same rich, challenging content as their peers.

That can mean incorporating visuals, vocabulary supports, and sentence stems into a history lesson or encouraging students to use their home language as a bridge toward developing academic English. Rather than separating multilingual learners from rigorous content, Kellee works with teachers to make that content accessible to them.

Her entrepreneurial streak didn’t stop there.

Kellee wanted Providence Middle students to have more opportunities to read books they actually wanted to read. So she took on another project: building a school library.

She helped create the collection and inventory system and intentionally stocked the shelves with books reflecting what her students wanted and needed, including Spanish-language titles and graphic novels. The library has become the foundation for an independent reading program and a welcoming place for students to discover books of their own choosing.

Library work in progress

The completed library!

For Kellee, that constant opportunity to build and grow is a big reason she has remained at Achievement First for more than a decade. She has moved from teaching math to serving as a dean of ELA and science to her current work supporting multilingual learners and coaching history teachers. Rather than feeling like she has mastered one job and stopped developing, she has continually found new problems to solve and new ways to become a better educator.

And teaching doesn’t stop when Kellee leaves Providence Middle.

Outside of school, she is a certified yoga instructor. She says her years in the classroom have made her a better yoga teacher: she thinks about clear directions, lesson structure, differentiation, and how to make the experience accessible to people with different levels of experience and mobility.

As for what Kellee likes to read herself? Her favorite series is Harry Potter. And despite spending her professional life helping other people, she doesn’t claim Gryffindor or Hufflepuff.

Put the Sorting Hat on her head, Kellee says, and she’s probably headed to Slytherin.

Why?

Because, as she puts it, she can be a little “spicy.” 

That combination of humor, determination, and willingness to take initiative seems fitting. Whether it means earning another degree, helping a teacher rethink a lesson, or building a library from scratch, Kellee rarely sees a problem and simply accepts it.

She starts figuring out how to solve it.