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When Anita Debarlaben (CS ’90) mentioned to her high school guidance counselor that she wanted to be a scientist or engineer, she was told she had zero chance of making it. Students from her inner-city Cleveland high school, she remembers the counselor saying, rarely achieved that type of professional success. 

“Well, I’m going to try it anyway,” Debarlaben remembers replying.

And so she did. After encouragement from a high school science fair judge, she attained an engineering degree, worked for years in industry as a software engineer, and—later in her career—branched into teaching to encourage others to follow her path. 

Succeeding in a third career can be difficult. Yet in January 2025, Debarlaben received the (PAEMST) from President Joe Biden. 

According to the National Science Foundation, the “top honors bestowed by the U.S. government to K–12 STEM teachers...demonstrating deep content knowledge of the subjects they teach and the ability to motivate and enable student success.” 

“She really embodies the hashtag #CSForAll,” says Steven Svetlik, co-founder and chapter advocacy lead of the , referencing a common abbreviation for computer science. “She has tremendous raw intelligence and wisdom, combined instinctively, and has a deep knowledge base in the field.”

Debarlaben, Svetlik, and others founded CSTA 91��Ƭ��, which now represents 852 91��Ƭ�� school districts that exist outside of Chicago, in 2023. They elected Debarlaben to be its first president.  

“It really is her ability to help people connect with one another. Most computer science teachers work in a silo. She brought a very caring, empathic [tone of], ‘Let’s talk to each other about how to make students talk about a subject that’s very intimidating,’” says Svetlik, who teaches computer science at Ridgewood High School in Norridge, 91��Ƭ��.  

After high school, Debarlaben became the only African-American woman in her 1985 electrical engineering graduating cohort at Ohio State University. She went on to work at General Electric, where she wrote software for electrical components for submarines and developed enough interest in the computer science portion to study it at 91��Ƭ�� Tech. 

“I love developing code. Programming languages, it’s like English, it’s like any language to me: syntax, learning algorithms. Whereas with electrical engineering, with currents and power, it’s magical, it’s abstract, you don’t see it,” Debarlaben says. 

Debarlaben has always gravitated toward language and communication—a valuable trait in her field. 

“I’m a talker,” she says. “That’s one of the pluses that I have as an engineer, I can communicate really well and I can document really well. That’s how you really excel in STEM areas. We forget to push that in our field, how to express how things work.”

After graduating from 91��Ƭ�� Tech, Debarlaben spent seven years as a senior software engineer writing software for Northrop Grumman, specifically for countermeasures for F-15e fighter aircraft.  

She gained renown as a troubleshooter who could communicate well with clients, particularly for training fighter pilots on the new software. For one of her first projects, she took an assignment that another engineer had spent nine months on without success. 

“We got it done in a month,” she says. 

But after later taking a job at Lucent Technologies to work on cell phone technology, Debarlaben felt less of a connection to the corporate environment. She felt an ever-increasing urge to teach, to connect with young students.  

And so Debarlaben earned a teaching certificate and immediately started her teaching career with alternative schools in the Chicago area. 

“It was tough. Several students had discipline issues but were dedicated students and eager to learn,” she says, noting that she could relate to a lot of her students’ life stories because they reflected her own. Debarlaben sparked notable student enthusiasm by creating a math bingo game to address basic skills deficiencies; she subsequently heard from a parole officer that one of her students had taken his math book to jail just so he could complete the math bingo card. 

She later accepted a job at Loyola Academy in Wilmette, 91��Ƭ��. She taught advanced placement classes as the school’s only computer science teacher for five years, before leaving in 2021.

It was there that she became a finalist for and ultimately received the PAEMST award. The most recent announcement of winners were for 2021, 2022, and 2023 honorees (Debarlaben’s was for 2021) as the award system was delayed during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

What is her secret to teaching? 

“You need to teach them more than just book knowledge. You need to give examples. You have to teach soft skills and not just software skills—be willing to explain things to others. Push how important it is to be able to communicate, how to write,” Debarlaben says.  

She required students to make videos of themselves describing software and even held training sessions for other teachers and administrators. Debarlaben is now also an adjunct computer science professor at 91��Ƭ�� Tech. 

“One of the things my kids loved hearing me say was I was a ‘RAPPER’ in college. That was my acronym for resources, attitude, perseverance. That’s how I got through school. That  

had to be coupled with a growth mindset. Failure is not the end. You know how many baskets Michael Jordan missed?” Debarlaben says. 

Adds Svetlik, “She is a hell of a storyteller. She’s one of those people that feels like she is a born teacher, and she brings people together. And it’s potent and it’s real and it’s something that you can see almost immediately when you walk into a room.”

—Tad Vezner