Sarah Page has a twinkle in her eye as she talks about the thing she’s most passionate about when it comes to her job: the students.

However, Page did not always plan to be a teacher. When Page was younger, she was a gymnast for 15 years. She started gymnastics at the age of 3 but stopped sophomore year feeling she had “outgrown it.”

“I wanted to be a high school student. I wanted to go to football games and I wanted to be social with my friends, and I just got tired of being a gymnast,” Page said.

“My job is to inspire the future,” Page said. “My job is to educate and prepare all of you so that you can go and pursue your own dreams and have the skills you need to go do what you want to do, what you’re passionate about, and what our society needs.”

Page’s favorite part of her job is creating relationships with her students. She loves watching them grow and sitting down and having real conversations with them.

“I suppose the best part [of my job] is when I have the opportunity to just sit and talk with students and watch them interact with each other and just get to know them,” she said.

She takes pride in watching them blossom not only over the course of their year together but in the years to come as they become the leaders of the school, go out into the real world and pursue their dreams.

One thing that Foothill adds to Page’s career is the environment and community the “staffulty” provides. In some of the other places she has worked, she didn’t feel included, wanted or supported. But, when it comes to the home of the Dragons, Page has seen a different environment.

“With the [everyone] it’s so collaborative. I feel that teachers are rooting for each other to succeed,” she said.

Some of Page’s favorite parts of the year are graduation, Dragon Talks, the freshman project and AVID bonding days. She loves seeing the work students put into their high school careers.

Outside of school, Page enjoys traveling. She has been to Europe, Northern Africa, Israel and South America, and hopes to make it to Southeast Asia one day.

“The more you see, the less you know” is the guiding mantra of her love of traveling. She feels educated and enriched after venturing out into the world, and the more stories she experiences in her travels, the more she feels she needs to learn.

Page is truly glad that she chose teaching as a career. In her early years, she couldn’t see herself working to educate others despite the fact that most of the people in her life did so. She attempted to work in public relations and tried to get a journalism degree, but after sitting behind a desk for a year in Oxnard, she learned that working with computers, answering emails and writing memos was something she despised.

So, Page quit her job and booked a plane ticket all the way to Buenos Aires.

While she lived there for a short time, she began to teach people the English language so they could do their jobs better, and found that she only had the skills of speaking English and teaching English. When she came back to America and began to teach more, she discovered this was it: teaching the future leaders of the world is what she wanted to do for the rest of her life.

“This is my stage,” said Page. “This is where I belong.”