Dr. John Collins, a ninth grade American history teacher at Liberty High School in the Mtn. View-Birch Tree School District, participated this summer in KC to DC, an intensive Holocaust education program sponsored by the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education.
The program included a trip to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., where educators toured the museum’s exhibitions. Members of the 2026 cohort also completed 11 hours of virtual classroom learning taught by the MCHE team and an intensive guided self-study assignment on Holocaust history.
The goals of KC to DC are to increase educators’ historical knowledge, instructional skills and connections to MCHE’s team and resources, while also fostering supportive relationships among teachers.
Collins said the experience will help him teach Holocaust history more effectively to ninth grade students at Liberty High School. Collins also serves as adjunct faculty at Southwest Baptist University’s Mtn. View campus, where he helps prepare future teachers.
“I am honored and humbled by this opportunity,” Collins said. “Walking through the exhibits at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and seeing firsthand the artifacts and stories from the Holocaust deepened my own understanding and allowed me to connect faces, stories and lives with what I had only read about in books.
“This educational experience truly changed the way I will teach this history by adding a layer of depth I would not otherwise have had,” he added. “KC to DC gave me the vocabulary, the primary sources and the historical grounding to help my students see individuals, not just statistics. I’m grateful to bring these resources home to my classroom at Liberty High School and to the future teachers I work with at SBU, so this history is taught with the care and personal context it deserves.”
KC to DC is funded through the support of Sam Devinki, whose parents, Fred and Maria Devinki, were Holocaust survivors. The program will be on hiatus while the museum renovates its permanent exhibition during 2027 and 2028. KC to DC is scheduled to restart in 2029.
For more information about professional development for educators and programs for students and the community, visit mchekc.org.
