Spotlight
Shining a spotlight on the Kind, Proud, Driven Leaders that make Buffalo High School stand out.
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From being a Buffalo High School Alumni to a teacher and two-sport coach, Josh Ortmann has truly lived in the halls of Buffalo High School. Mr. Ortmann has not only been a leader on the court and throughout the halls as a coach and teacher, but also as a teammate and student. During his time at Buffalo High School, Ortmann had one of the experiences that made a student never want to walk across the…
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On April 10, 2026, Buffalo High School hosted its first-ever Unified Symposium, which invited nearly forty representatives from schools across the state to learn about the systems Buffalo High School has in place to embed and grow its exceptional Unified curriculum into daily life. The goal would then be for educators and administrators who attended the Unified Symposium to bring this knowledge back to their schools and implement it into their own systems. Through nearly…
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Julia Weigle is a student teacher here at Buffalo High School in the music department and has been working with students for a couple of months. Ms. Weigle hailed from St. Michael and is attending Luther College in Iowa, in the last semester of her senior year. She has worked hard here at Buffalo High School to become a better teacher and connect with students. “I have really loved working with both the students and…
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This year, Jess Nickelsen, a fundamental employee of Buffalo High School’s library, recently found herself in the Spanish classroom yet again. In previous years, Nickelsen had only been seen working in the library; what many students may not know is that before she began to work in the LLC, Nickelsen taught Spanish classes for 21 years. Before Nickelsen began to teach, she had been a Spanish major in college. Throughout college, Nickelsen studied abroad in…
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Most language students could probably agree that learning a language can definitely be difficult. But for German teacher Michele Strassburg, connecting with the German language (and culture) has never been hard work for her. Despite growing up in a family with a fluent German speaker, Mrs. Strassburg had only begun her linguistic studies when she entered high school. “It was something that came very easily to me,” Strassburg commented. “And I would always dream about…
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Many students unwind from the day by scrolling through social media, playing video games, or reading a book. For Connor Gallart ‘27, however, peace comes from tending to his 240-gallon fish tank after a long day. Gallart first got into fishkeeping when he and his aunt lived together. His aunt was a lifelong fishkeeper, and together they repurposed the 240 gallon scorpion enclosure in the basement of his home into a fish tank. “She got…
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As of the second trimester of the 2025-2026 school year, English teacher Madi Miller is the only English 10 instructor who has adapted curriculum to align with the updated Minnesota K-12 Language Arts standards, which went into effect July 3, 2023. These standards state that students should be able to “Analyze influences on content, meaning, and style of text, including fact and fiction, time period, and author perspective and identity, including Dakota and Anishinaabe perspective,…
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Chloe Erickson ‘26 originally started her small business, Chloe’s Embroidery and Crafts, as a way to make extra money, but since then it has turned into fun bonding time with her Grandma. Erickson sought out her Grandma to be her business partner because she had taught her how to sew and has been a big supporter of the business. “I asked for an embroidery machine one year for Christmas, and I was expecting a little…
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Mr. Monson has been teaching for 12 years, eight of those being outside of Buffalo. He used to teach exclusively business classes at BHS, but this year, he teaches both history and business. So what was his life like before being in Buffalo? When he first went to college, he had no idea what to pick for his major. “People told me that the best way to make money was computer science, so I majored…
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Respected by students and colleagues, Heather Tierney has become a pillar of the community at Buffalo High School. Every day she can be seen teaching English courses, but her true dedication to her craft doesn’t just occur in literature class. Along with being a teacher, Tierney is also an author. In 2014, she published her first book, The Freedom of a Tangled Vine. Despite having a yearning to write more, she thought that was the…