Maritza Vasquez, a teacher at the Academy for Language and Technology in the Bronx, sees a lot of herself in her 9th-grade immigrant students. She said she’s able to relate “to everything they are feeling” because at one time she felt the same way. “I tell them I was a newcomer myself.”

A five-year veteran of Major League Lacrosse, Kieran McArdle is a first-year K–5 physical education teacher at PS 48 in upper Manhattan and the embodiment of what the city’s Department of Education hopes to achieve with PE Works.