Jessica Day has been teaching social studies for 19 years. Day earned her Undergraduate Degree from the College of Saint Mary in Omaha, NE, in 2000, and a Graduate Degree from the University of Nebraska Kearney in 2003. She teaches at Kearney High School, is a USHMM Teacher Fellow, and Holocaust by Bullets trained educator.

On her journey with Holocaust education, Day says, “My deeper studies in Holocaust education began in 2012 when Kearney Public Schools approved an elective course on the Holocaust. I then began a life changing educational journey with the Institute for Holocaust Education, The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and The Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Teachers' Program. Their work with professional educators is significant and has had momentous impacts on myself personally and in my classroom. More importantly though, their work has had a life-altering impact on the students that I teach. In 2016, I traveled to Holocaust related sites with HJRTP as I felt I had a profound sense of responsibility to bring what I learned from my travels back to my classroom. The last day on our trip was spent at Treblinka, I was walking away from the site where genocide had taken place and I turned and silently prayed and promised to those that were murdered that I would tell their story and I would work to educate my students on the lessons, history, and personal stories of the Holocaust for as long as I was an educator.” Her semester course is Understanding History of the Holocaust, and Genocide, Political Science, and Psychology.

Day says that education is her greatest passion, while her greatest love and influence is her family. She says she is blessed to be married to her husband, Damon, for 14 years and have two amazing kids, Cody Jon (12) and Emma (11). They love to travel, spend time at the ocean, lake, with family, at sporting events, or musicals.

Robert Mishou is from a military family and has lived in several places including New Jersey, New York, and Texas. He spent his middle school and high school years in Frankfurt, Germany, however, where he graduated in 1987 and where his interest in the Holocaust began. He has been teaching for 29 years, 27 of which have been at Kearney High School in Kearney, Nebraska. Mishou received his BA in 1992 from the University of Nebraska at Kearney, where he also went on to earn his MA in 2000. At Kearney High School, he is an English teacher who has taught every class offered and serves as the Chair of the English Department. Outside of the classroom, he is a beloved soccer coach for the school.

Mishou was honored as Teacher of the Year by the Kearney Public Schools Foundation in 2004, and Nebraska State Assistant Coach of the year in 2016. His work with teaching the Holocaust includes being a USHMM Teacher Fellow in 2016, along with instructing the Holocaust through the lens of literature and media literacy. He feels strongly that teaching about the Holocaust, in particular the propaganda used to fuel the Nazi machine, is very relevant to how we live and learn today in the 21^st century. It can teach us not only what happened and why, but also how these mechanisms of persuasion are still used today.  

“History does not repeat, but it does instruct. As the Founding Fathers debated our Constitution, they took instruction from the history they knew. Concerned that the democratic republic they envisioned would collapse, they contemplated the descent of ancient democracies and republics into oligarchy and empire. As they knew, Aristotle warned that inequality brought instability, while Plato believed that demagogues exploited free speech to install themselves at tyrants. In founding a democratic republic upon law and establishing a system of checks and balances, the Founding Fathers sought to avoid the evil that they, like the ancient philosophers, called tyranny.“