Thomas Jefferson's Bryan a football and early education standout

Shortly after signing his National Letter of Intent to play center for the NCAA Division 1 Kent State Golden Flashes on Dec. 15, Nick Bryan headed to the Thomas Jefferson High School cafeteria where a surprise awaited him.

Youngsters ages 2 ½ to 4 from the TJ nursery school lined up with signs and shouted support for the highly recruited tackle. This meant the world to Nick, who has helped out at the nursery school at TJ for two years — a record for any student.

“It’s just really special and something that I’ll hold with me forever,” said Nick, 18, of Pleasant Hills, who still has the signs the kids made for him lining the back seat of his car. “Right now they might not understand it all, but one day, they can connect back and realize how they changed my life just as much as I hope that I changed theirs.”

Nick, now a senior, started in the child development program as a sophomore at TJ, taking the introductory prerequisite theory class. He’s always felt a connection with younger children and was excited to learn more about caring for them.

In the theory class, students learn everything from how kids grow and develop to how to change a diaper and feed them healthy snacks, said Lindsey Moore, family and consumer science teacher. After learning the basics, students can proceed to a semester-long nursery school class, which Moore describes as similar to a student teaching role. There, they work one-on-one with about 15 youngsters from the area who spend up to four mornings a week at TJ, being cared for by high school students in the class.

It was in that class that Nick found his passion. This spring, he will take the class for the fourth time, because he loves working with children so much.

“As soon as I took nursery (class), I fell in love with it,” he said. “I fell in love with the whole idea of teaching kids and being around kids, working with them and watching them develop and grow into young men and women.”

The young students in nursery school quickly fell in love with Nick, Moore said. When he enters the room, a handful of them shout out his name in excitement. Some even attended TJ football games to see him play.

“Everybody wants to sit on his lap when we come to circle time. Everybody wants to sit at his table,” Moore said. “He’s just happy-go-lucky, always positive with them, very understanding and empathetic and goofy and funny. He knows how to play and he understands their personalities.”

For Nick, it’s also important that the students are learning and growing while having fun at nursery school.

“These kids are the future. They are what’s going to shape the world into a greater place and we need to give them the correct footprint (to start),” he said.

Nick not only focuses on academics with the students. He also tries to teach them core values, like honesty and respect.

“It’s the ‘Thank you,’ ‘Yes, ma’am,’ ‘No sir,’ all of those things that will help them develop into a good person,” he said.

Each high school student is assigned their own buddy for the semester. The 15 youngsters are at the high school for three periods, with one partner per period.

The high school students rotate assignments, including teaching the class.

Nick has learned to come prepared and learn each student’s personality so that he can help them in the way they learn best.

Oh, and be prepared for messes. They always happen with little ones.

He loves the hands-on interaction with the youngsters and was surprised at how quickly he became attached to the students.

Nick someday hopes to become a fourth-grade teacher and high school football coach and is majoring in elementary education at Kent State.

He also participates in a new program at TJ that places a handful of high school students in elementary and middle school classrooms for one period a day to shadow and assist teachers at the lower grade levels. He spent 12 weeks at Jefferson Hills Intermediate School in 2021 and is now at Pleasant Hills Middle School to shadow.

Whether it’s through teaching or coaching, Nick wants to make a difference in the lives of his students.

“You can really make an imprint on young adults and teach them what’s right and what’s wrong in the real world – turn them from young men and young women into grown men and grown women and really teach them how to go to college successfully, or go to trade school, or to the military and be successful,” he said.

Watching Nick assist in the nursery school over the last two years, Moore has seen him grow.

For Nick, the nursery school made his high school experience even better.

“Honestly, I don’t know what school would be like without seeing the kids smiling and laughing,” he said. “After having a math test, sometimes you’ve just got to go hang out with the kids, run around and play with some trucks or some dinosaurs. It calms you down.”