GRAND RAPIDS, MI – Kentwood elementary teacher Sarah Kresnak said she’s motivated every day by an opportunity to watch her first-grade students learn to read.

In her 20th year as an educator, she teaches at Discovery Elementary School, part of the Kentwood Public Schools district.

Kresnak has spent the entirety of her education career with Kentwood Public Schools, starting as a Michigan State University intern at the district’s Challenger Elementary. She’s taught full time with the district since 2005.

She said seeing her hard work pay off has been incredibly fulfilling. For the 2025-26 school year, Kresnak was selected as one of the state of Michigan’s 10 Regional Teachers of the Year.

But the biggest reward, she said, is getting to work with her students every day.

“I’m here every day because of them,” she said. “They make it the best job.”

The Michigan Department of Education (MDE) named Kresnak as one of 10 regional honorees in late February for the year 2025-26. She was named Teacher of the Year for Region 3, which includes an area of West Michigan that encompasses 13 counties, from Mason, Lake and Osceola counties in the north to Allegan and Barry counties in southwest Michigan.

Kresnak is a Kent County educator, one of 693 teachers in the Kentwood Public Schools district serving 9,639 students as of the 2025-26 school year.

This school district has the highest graduation rate in the Grand Rapids area

The 10 teachers were selected through a competitive application process that began with student, staff and community member nominations. They are finalists to be Michigan’s Teacher of the Year.

Together, they make up the Michigan Teacher Leadership Advisory Council, working with MDE to provide education policy input and taking back information to their regions.

“The Regional Teachers of the Year are selected from among Michigan’s many outstanding educators who play such an important role in student learning,” State Superintendent Michael Rice said in a statement. “Regional Teachers of the Year also elevate the voices of teachers by sharing their experiences and valuable insight with our department and the State Board of Education.”

Kresnak said the experience that brings her the most joy is teaching her first-graders how to read.

“They come in just starting to know how to read,” she said. “I feel incredibly fortunate that I get the opportunity to see all the lightbulbs pop on at different times.”

“The coolest part is that it breeds excitement. One child will get it, and there will be this domino effect of excitement for other friends as they understand it.”

The biggest challenge throughout this process is helping reluctant students find the motivation to learn to read, she said.

“We have a lot of mottos that I use to motivate kids who might take a little longer, like ‘everyone reads at different speeds’ or ‘fast doesn’t always mean great.’”

Kresnak said finding silly things to help students, like printing off pictures of celebrities and adding speech bubbles to their faces, is a fun part of her job that also makes a difference.

One of the biggest lessons she’s learned in teaching is to look at student behavior as communication. Really getting to know students is important to understand them and their needs.

Kentwood Public Schools Superintendent Kevin Polston said the district is proud of Kresnak’s accomplishment as Region 3 Teacher of the Year.

“This honor reflects the everyday excellence she exudes in her classroom by fostering meaningful relationships with students and families and delivering rigorous learning experiences to help our students achieve at the highest levels,” he said. “Additionally, her innate belief in the potential of our kids sets her apart.

“We couldn’t be more delighted for Sarah, Discovery Elementary School, and the entire Kentwood community as we celebrate this well-deserved recognition,” Polston added.

Kresnak said working at Kentwood is a unique and valuable experience because the district has such a diverse student population, and “it’s really incredible to see all of the diversity and the value that each family brings to our school and to our classroom community.”

Regional Teachers of the Year go on to interview with a panel of statewide education stakeholders before one person is selected for the 2025-26 Michigan Teacher of the Year.

The selected teacher has a non-voting seat on the state’s Board of Education, also representing the state across the country and becoming a candidate for National Teacher of the Year.

Kresnak said her goal with this larger platform is to shine a light on district achievements and try to involve the community more in elementary programming.

Other Regional Teachers of the Year include:

• Region 1: Susan Solomon, an elementary teacher at JKL Bahweting Anishnabe Public School Academy in Sault Ste. Marie.
• Region 2: Thomas Schultz, a science teacher at Charlevoix Middle/High School in Charlevoix Public Schools.
• Region 4: Heather Wolf, a social studies teacher at Shepherd High School in Shepherd Public Schools.
• Region 5: Corey Rosser, a social studies teacher at Quest High School in North Branch Area Schools.
• Region 6: Becky Manore, a Spanish teacher at Grand Ledge High School in Grand Ledge Public Schools.
• Region 7: Lindsey Cook, an elementary teacher at Sonoma Elementary School in Harper Creek Community Schools.
• Region 8: Deidra LaPointe, an elementary teacher at Luther C. Klager Elementary School in Manchester Community Schools.
• Region 9: Stephanie Jaskolski, an English language arts teacher at Woodhaven Upper Elementary in Woodhaven-Brownstown School District.
• Region 10: Susan Kelsey-Brewton, a science teacher at Hope Academy in Detroit.

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Washington — Foreign immigration across the state buoyed Michigan’s best-in-decades population growth last year, according to federal data released Thursday.

In a year when the Michigan population increased by about 57,000 (or 0.6%), all but one of the state’s 83 counties saw increases in their number of foreign-born residents. The only one that did not — Arenac County— had zero net change in that metric.

The state also saw significant growth in Metro Detroit to eclipse losses from the previous year, continued growth in the Grand Rapids area and limited population decline in rural areas. Altogether, the data release presents a mostly positive report card for Michigan as it continues a concerted effort to grow its population by retaining residents, attracting new ones and stemming losses from deaths exceeding births.

“The news is good right now,” said Kurt Metzger, a demographer and director emeritus of Data Driven Detroit. But he urged officials at every level of government across the state to continue working on the issue.

“Yes, the population went up between ’23 and ’24. Wasn’t that wonderful? And we all benefited. But don’t get cocky, because it could go down tomorrow,” he said in a phone interview.

More: Key group fuels Michigan population growth in 2024, census shows

Previous Census data showed that Michigan’s population reached a historic high of 10.1 million in 2024, keeping Michigan as the 10th most populous state. The new county-level data shed light on more specific details of that growth and show that Michigan’s population trends were consistent with national ones.

“Increasingly, population growth in metro areas is being shaped by international migration,” said Kristie Wilder, a demographer in the Census Bureau’s Population Division. “While births continue to contribute to overall growth, rising net international migration is offsetting the ongoing net domestic outmigration we see in many of these areas.”

Metro Detroit’s Oakland, Wayne and Macomb counties — all of which have concentrated pockets of immigrant, largely Arab-American populations — accounted for three of the top four spots in total population growth from July 2023 to July 2024. Combined, those counties grew by more than 30,600 people.

Metzger pointed out that Wayne County, which grew by almost 8,700 people, had its first population gain since the early 1990s.

The new data release also reflects significant revisions to population estimates from past years, mostly due to the Census Bureau expanding how it measures immigration. The revisions were especially significant for Metro Detroit. Original estimates for Wayne County, for example, suggested a population loss of nearly 8,000 people between 2022 and 2023. That loss is now estimated at 640.

After Metro Detroit, Grand Rapids-area Kent and Ottawa counties were the next biggest hub for growth last year with a combined increase of more than 10,500 residents. Three other counties (Washtenaw, Ingham and Kalamazoo) had population jumps of more than 1,000.

Nat Zorach, who teaches at Michigan State University’s School of Planning, Design and Construction, said the growth for Kent, Washtenaw and Ingham counties could be an early sign of success for local zoning changes that encourage more new housing construction and conversion of single-family homes into multi-unit properties.

He noted that local governments in Grand Rapids (Kent), Ann Arbor (Washtenaw) and Lansing (Ingham) have all pursued zoning reforms in recent years.

In total, 55 counties saw population increases, 27 saw declines and one (Iosco) had net zero growth. Notably, no county lost more than 163 people. Zorach suggested that the relative steadiness of populations in more rural counties could be due to post-pandemic lifestyle trends.

“I think that there is an attractiveness to small-town life that is probably substantially driven by the fact that it’s cheap to live there,” he said in a phone interview. Zorach also noted that there has been a years-long trend of county populations centralizing in the area’s largest municipality.

“Tiny towns get smaller, but the county seat might grow in a small amount,” he said.

Metzger, however, warned that population watchers should not take too much from last year’s data. “There is a stabilization, but I would hesitate saying that this is a trend,” he said. “The rural areas have been able to hold on. I just worry about where they go next.”

He recalled speaking to a group of rural hospital administrators in Michigan several years ago about their institutions’ long-term viability. “I asked if they were part of any countywide or multi-county efforts around populations, and they were like deer in the headlights,” the demographer said.

The Growing Michigan Together Council, a group convened by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer that spent five months in 2023 strategizing on how to boost the state’s population, did not include many specific recommendations or plans for rural areas. The word “rural” appears three times in the 86-page report.

That report mostly focused on improving Michigan’s education system, encouraging business innovation and addressing housing and infrastructure deficiencies across the state. It also called immigration a “bright spot hidden in Michigan’s current population trend.”

While international immigration contributed to growth across Michigan last year, domestic population indicators were still negative — albeit less so than in past years.

Census data released in December showed that deaths, while decreasing from the previous year, still exceeded births in Michigan last year by 2,855. In total, 72 of Michigan’s 83 counties saw more births than deaths, according to the Census Bureau, or just shy of 88% of counties.

But there were some pockets of what demographers call natural growth, defined as births exceeding deaths.

Kent County had the strongest natural growth last year, followed by Wayne County. The largest natural decline was in Genesee County, home to Flint.

Across the state, net domestic migration losses fell by more than half from the previous year, dropping from -17,446 to -7,656. Net domestic migration refers to the number of people who left Michigan for another U.S. state minus the number of people who moved to Michigan from another state.

“That just shows the importance that immigration plays in Michigan’s future,” Metzger said.

gschwab@detroitnews.com

@GrantSchwab