October 21, 2014

To Whom it May Concern:

As I sat down to write a letter of recommendation for Liz Jones, I welcomed the challenge of how I could
explain the scale of her outstanding performance in my class. I have decided I would need a logarithmic
scale as her progress and achievement stand out as orders of magnitude beyond her peers. Liz is driven,
focused, organized, hardworking and very bright. I have had the pleasure to work with Liz during her
preAP Algebra 2, preAP physics, preAP precalculus class and now her AP calculus class. Throughout
each of these demanding classes, Liz has demonstrated remarkable independence and an ability to set
a demanding schedule and stick to it. Our school, Garza Independence High School is self-paced with
students taking on the lions share of responsibility for their progress and learning. In an amazing feat
of academic prowess, she has completed these courses with me in just over a year and has completed
each course in record time with an outstanding grade. These are courses that frequently take our hardest
working students a year each. At the beginning of each week, she lets me know what her completion
schedule looks like and which tests she will need. I am shocked by the amount of material she is tackling
and know she must be working very hard at home and on the weekends to make this kind of progress in
my classes, let alone keep up with the work she is doing for her other classes including early college start
classes at Austin Community College.
Liz is a supreme project manager. In addition to her academic work, she is president of the Academic
Society and has organized many successful initiatives, from blood drives, toy drives and bake sales, to
the design and implementation of a butterfly garden on campus. The butterfly garden is an especially
beautiful success story that I had the privilege to watch unfold. The idea started as a casual comment
from the assistant principal about how nice it would be to have a butterfly garden, in my other role as the
biology teacher at Garza, I thought it would be great to have a setting for my students to do some ecology
fieldwork. The next thing I knew, Liz had site plans for a butterfly garden directly outside my classroom
window. She had researched plants, butterfly needs, materials, and had crunched the numbers for an
estimated cost. She had made sure to make the garden accessible with beds at wheelchair height and
appropriate clearance for pathways. Our school has a sister relationship with a local nursing home and
she ensured the garden would provide comfortable opportunities for the elderly volunteers to work in the
gardens with our students. She then began working on a capital campaign with a bake sale and she even
found someone who would match the funds raised. The finished site is beautiful and there are hundreds of
butterflies viewable from my window. I use the site for ecology labs and it is very convenient to have an
outdoor learning place so accessible.
After the success of the butterfly garden, Lets have the academic society work on it; I can ask Liz
became a go to strategy for getting things done on campus. If we need a student run initiative to get off
the ground, we have a leader. I am sure Liz is going to continue to be a very productive, contributing
member of her community and I highly recommend her.
Sincerely
Margaret Fackler