The clock was approaching 2 p.m. on April 22. Sitting across the City Hall horseshoe via Zoom was Kat Gamber and her students at White Rock Montessori. They had been on the call since 9 a.m., each waiting their turn to speak, about their concerns and request for the removal of the roofing manufacturer GAF and TAMKO factories from West and South Dallas.

Gamber, who currently works as the middle school lead at White Rock Montessori, is an Oak Cliff native, a Hockaday School alumna and vice president of the Bishop Arts Neighborhood Association. Through her position at the Montessori, she teaches across all content areas to seventh and eighth grade students.

When her students were learning biology and environmental systems, they started to look at water and air quality, which led them to learn about how that quality impacts Dallas, inspiring her students to speak to the city council.

“Dallas doesn’t have great air quality, and that’s a fact that we look at when we study history and that we look at in science,” she says. “I think connection with the land is a really important part of our school’s program, like right now they’re going on camping trips all throughout the year. It wasn’t a specific topic, it was more like we were studying environmentalism and those systems, and learning about how you monitor air quality, water quality, and learning about how you could create change around that.”

Gamber earned her bachelor’s in education and psychology at Southern Methodist University. She says that her time in a competitive and high pressure education environment inspired her to earn her first master’s degree in counseling. She was considering opening a private practice when she learned about the Montessori philosophy of not only teaching academic subjects, but nurturing the emotional health and social skills of students.

“Creating peace is the work of education, and I feel like that’s what actually kept me in education was finding Montessori, and when I did that, I was like, ‘Oh, well, I want to go back and learn more about how I could integrate STEM into Montessori,’ which traditionally shies away from technology, I think a lot of times,” she says of earning her second master’s degree in STEM and Montessori education. “And so it’s been a really interesting balance because in so many ways we are very low tech in terms of writing or things like that, and then on the other hand, we really value technology when we’re about to utilize it in meaningful ways, in creative ways and in ways that help us advocate for change.”

Advocacy comes naturally to Gamber. She says that as a citizen, you have to be involved in your local community if you want to see a living environment you truly desire.

“If you see a problem, you want to solve it,” she says. “I was at Tyler and Eighth Street, and I just would be watching people run across the street, trying not to get hit by cars, trying to get to the coffee shop across the street, and I’m like, ‘What, this is crazy, where’s the urban development here? Where’s the planning for this?’ I was out there with my daughter, and I said, ‘Hey, let’s just make a petition,’ and we just stopped people, and I said, ‘Hey, did you want to cross the street?’ And I was like, ‘How did you feel when you’re crossing? You’re scared.’ I said, ‘Oh, do you think that there should be a stoplight or a crosswalk here?’ And everybody signed it.”

Combining her lived experiences and STEM education background, Gamber brings those lessons to her classroom to help encourage the next generation to advocate for the causes they care about, too.

“I hope that they feel empowered, that they continue. I want them to grow up and be participants,” she says. “As much as the government has a duty to serve the citizens, the citizens have a duty to be involved.”