It is said that a teacher’s classroom is their kingdom and their students are their subjects. If that’s true, then Fluvanna County High School has its own Empress, and her name is Victoria Zavadsky. As head of FCHS’s English department, Zavadsky has a lot on her plate. Not only does she have to teach and score her students’ work, she also has to confer with and help manage the rest of her department. But despite her obligations, she is still one of the best known teachers in the high school, and that is no easy feat.

When one hears the name “Zavadsky” in the halls one’s mind automatically flashes to bleeding papers and never-ending essays; it is the inevitable fate of any student who crosses her threshold to deal with such things. In Zavadsky’s class, it isn’t literature or reading comprehension that reigns supreme, it is writing. Writing is Ms. Zavadsky’s area of expertise. As for how she got there, well, she isn’t quite sure.

“What’s funny is most English teachers go into English to do literature, and I think that’s where I started, but somehow I have fallen into the writing aspect of it… so, I think writing is my area,” she said.

Zavadsky went on to explain that the feeling of being able to groom students towards writing success is what she likes the most about teaching. “I like getting students to be able to write something that is cohesive—that ‘Aha!’ moment when they make it,” Zavadsky explained.  And under her tutelage, and with the help of her predecessors, many of Zavadsky’s students do indeed become excellent writers.

Zavadsky has a history of helping create high-scoring students, both in her general and AP level classes. Her typical AP class balances out a few percent better than the national average, and Fluvanna’s school-wide SOL scores placed it in the top five schools in the state for writing scores. However Zavadsky refuses to take any credit for these accomplishments, saying that nothing she did would amount to anything near what it has if it wasn’t for the educators who came before her. “It’s not a one person effort,” Zavadsky said, “each teacher adds to it each year.”

As for the high scores themselves, Zavadsky chalks it up to preparation: “Students do more writing in the AP course than they do in any other course, and that prepares them… I think it’s just that we have a very good team right now. We have a good department whose goals are for the kids; they’re very student centered.”

With such an impressive track record, both personally and department wide, one would think that Zavadsky had always been teaching, but strangely, she actually started out at Cosmetology school. “I sort of bounced around from job to job,” Zavadsky explained. “I did a lot of photography—a lot of developing the film—back before they had digital cameras.” After that she spent ten years as a “HUC,” (Health Unit Coordinator) at UVA; three of those years were spent in Orthopedics, and the other seven were at the Coronary Care Unit, also known as the CCU. “It was kind of like [being] a glorified secretary, but if there was a code [or emergency], I was the one doing it.”

Oddly enough, it was while she was working at the CCU that she started on her teaching degree. She enrolled full-time at VCU, still working at UVA, and was well on her way to becoming a pharmacist. It was then that she decided it was all too much. “I was taking Chemistry, Physics, Calculus, and English, and there came a point when I was just, ‘I don’t like this.’[So] I flipped into the English department,” Zavadsky said.

Her first teaching job led her to Orange County, where she worked under Fluvanna’s current superintendent Gena Keller. It was only later that she was lured to Fluvanna by recommendations from friends and former colleagues Sherry Esch and Sherry Doane. In the end, Zavadsky’s move to Fluvanna has only proved to be beneficial for all parties involved. She loves her job, and offered this as her parting remark: “[Teaching] is the torturous task of looking at essay after essay, but in the long run it looks good for everyone.”