Ryan Descheneaux

At his uncle’s wake and funeral in 2017, Ryan Descheneaux heard from Ernie Descheneaux’s former students at Lowell High School about the influence that the English teacher and baseball coach had on their lives.

It cemented the teenage Descheneaux’s desire to become a teacher.

“Everybody loved him,” says Descheneaux, now a junior majoring in education. “I thought, ‘If I could be that person for one student, I’ve done a good deed.’”

Descheneaux, a Lowell native, was already on that path, thanks to his parents’ encouragement and the examples of other role models, including his late grandfather, who coached baseball in a Pawtucketville youth organization for 42 years.

“He coached my uncle, my brother and me,” Descheneaux says. “He always wanted to be involved.”

Descheneaux began teaching T-ball to younger kids when he was 12 years old. He went on to play baseball for Lowell High, and as soon as he graduated, he began volunteering as an assistant coach for the school team and in a youth league that plays during the offseason.

Another inspiration to pursue a career in education was one of Descheneaux’s first friends in kindergarten and elementary school: Kaitlyn, a girl with Down syndrome. Because of her, “I’ve always wanted to do special ed, rather than general ed,” he says.

At Lowell High School, Descheneaux got involved with the Best Buddies club, and he and a teacher teamed up to start the unified physical education and basketball programs. Going into his senior year, Descheneaux had earned so many credits that he was able to work as an intern in the high school’s “intensive adaptive” program for students who are nonverbal and have serious physical disabilities.

During the summers, Descheneaux volunteered at Camp Paul in Chelmsford, a weeklong overnight camp for teens with different abilities, where he met his best friend, Ben, a young man with Down syndrome for whom Descheneaux sometimes serves as a personal care assistant.

“I like being around kids and helping them, whether it’s improving their social skills or their academic skills,” he says.

Descheneaux says he has thrived at UMass Lowell, where he will earn dual licensure in elementary education and teaching students with mild to moderate disabilities in grades K-8.

“UMass Lowell has shaped me to become an educator who is flexible and willing to teach all age groups,” he says.

Through field placements, Descheneaux has worked with children as young as 5. He’s a peer mentor to Lowell High School students who are taking an introductory teaching course at the university, and he’s working full time as a special education teacher for high school students at the Collegiate Charter School of Lowell.

He hopes to do his student teaching at the same school and to stay on after graduation. Wherever he ends up working, though, he plans to remain in Lowell, where he lives with his parents, his brother and his beloved dog, Bernie, a Saint Bernard-Labrador mix.

“I made a deal with my mom my sophomore year of high school. I said, ‘If I go to UMass Lowell, can we get a dog?’ My mom said yes,” he says with a laugh. “I didn’t tell her, but I knew I was already planning to go to UMass Lowell.”