Biography

Neil Plotnick, an educator for over 20 years, has been a special education and computer science (CS) teacher for 18 years at Everett High School. He has co-taught in virtually every content area at the high school level including Algebra, Geometry, Chemistry, Biology, Earth Science, English, History, and Oceanography. For the past seven years, Neil has taught CS, specializing in cybersecurity. He established the Cybersecurity Educators Group on Facebook which has over 1,800 active members. He has also served as the District Coordinator for Special Olympics and Adviser to the afterschool Computer Club. Neil was named a Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) Equity Fellow for the 2024-25 year. In 2024, he was named the Massachusetts STEM Educator of the Year by the Civil Air Patrol. He had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to experience the total solar eclipse over northern Maine where he did science experiments with other educators and share the results with his students. Neil was the 2023 Aspirations in Computing – National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) Affiliate Educator Winner, and Cyber.org's 2022 Cyber Educator of the Year. Neil is an active member of CSTA. He has presented several times at the annual and regional conferences of the CSTA on how his students use the GNU Linux operating system. In 2014, he presented at the 100 Superstar Teachers conference that was sponsored by NCWIT and NSF. In 2024, Neil was a presenter at the LibrePlanet annual conference. Neil has his B.A. in geography from the State University of New York at Binghamton and his M.Ed. in education from the Graduate College of Education at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He has graduate certificates in CS from the College of St. Scholastica and LA Tech University.