First joining the West staff as a substitute, then as a long-term sub, Mrs. Brittany Bierly has officially joined the Math department teaching Probability and Statistics and Algebra 2.
Raised near Louisville Kentucky, in a small town called Floyds Knobs on the Indiana side of the Ohio River, she said that “I’ve got a southern piece to me,” and “you can take the girl out of Indiana, but you can’t take the Indiana out of the girl.”
After studying at Indiana University, she taught at a high school in Indiana and she says that “when I got out of college and started actually doing math teaching, I realized that I do love math, but I also love teenagers. So, I think that my favorite thing about this job is just being around young people.”
She then moved to Chicago with her high school sweetheart until 2015 and then they moved to Glen Ellyn. They have four children: a sophomore here at West, an eighth and sixth grader at Hadley, and a third grader at Forest Glenn. She paused her career to raise them and says “my husband has a very busy, stressful job, so it was nice for one of us to be there so that when he was busy, we didn’t have to juggle babysitters and daycare. So, it was more, it really made it easy for our family and I just liked being with them.”
When her youngest started full day school, she found herself needing to be around other people and put in a substitute application at Glenbard West. She started subbing in 2023 and then subbed long term at the end of last year. “I love Glenbard West so I think that if that subbing hadn’t gone well or if it just weren’t the right fit, I don’t think that I would have come back to teaching.”
Outside of work, she “loves to read … to go to concerts, listen to music. In the summer, I like to sit out in the backyard and garden and plant flowers and fruits and vegetables and all that.” She is a fan of historical fiction and mystery novels in particular.
She describes herself as a very open and easy going person that “would do anything for my kids at home and my students at school,” and just hopes that kids “see me as somebody they can count on.”
