Most teachers chase tenure. This one walked away from full-time teaching at the height of it. Losette Asong, a 30-year-old educator from Passi City, Iloilo, was named Teacher of the Year in 2024 and nominated as one of South Dakota’s outstanding biology teachers in 2025 — then stepped back from the classroom on purpose, betting that her next chapter mattered as much as the awards behind her.
Her path to that decision began far from any American science lab. It started on a campus in Iloilo, where she was less a wallflower than a fixture at the front of the room.
A student leader before she was a teacher
Long before she graded her first quiz, she was learning how to lead. At Iloilo Science and Technology University (ISAT U), where she earned a Bachelor of Secondary Education major in Biological Science, she served as University Student Council President and sat on the University Board of Regents as the student body’s representative — a seat at the table where institutional decisions were made.
That early immersion in service shaped how she would later run a classroom. Her involvement with YouthLead Philippines deepened it. “These experiences taught me the importance of empowering others and giving back to the community,” she shares with TGFM — less a slogan than an operating principle.
When she stepped into teaching in the Philippines, she found her footing in science education, drawn to the moment a student’s curiosity catches fire. But she wanted to test that calling somewhere unfamiliar.
The leap to South Dakota
The decision to teach abroad was not about escape. It was about scale. “I wanted to demonstrate that Filipino teachers are highly capable, adaptable, and dedicated professionals who can make meaningful contributions wherever they are given the opportunity to serve,” she explains.
South Dakota became that proving ground. As a science teacher there, she handled curriculum planning, laboratory work, classroom instruction, and the quieter labor of mentoring — the part of teaching that rarely shows up on a lesson plan but tends to matter most. The recognition followed: Teacher of the Year in 2024, then the state nomination a year later.
The accolades, she’s quick to clarify, were never the point. “True success is found in the lives we touch, the lessons we share, and the positive impact we leave behind,” she says. For her, the metric was always a learner gaining the confidence to attempt something they’d written off as impossible.
Still, the distance carried a cost. Like many overseas Filipino workers, the hardest part was the absence of the people she loved. There were stretches of homesickness, of cultural adjustment, of plain uncertainty in those first months. What carried her through was a steady scaffolding of faith, family, and friends. “Their encouragement helped me stay focused on my purpose and reminded me why I chose this path,” she recalls.
A new season, on her own terms
So the step back from full-time school work was not retreat but redirection. Today she operates as an independent educational consultant, building curricula and running educational research projects remotely, while turning real attention toward her family and, increasingly, toward entrepreneurship.
“I believe that learning never stops,” she says, and she intends to carry the same principles — leadership, perseverance, service — into business ventures the way she once carried them into a lab.
Passi City remains the thread running through all of it. A former Passi City Scholar, she has a sharp sense of debt owed. “I consider myself a living return on that investment,” she says, framing her hometown’s faith in her education as something to be repaid rather than simply remembered. She hopes to channel that into local initiatives for young people, further studies, and community work grounded where she started.
Her advice to kababayans navigating life overseas is unsentimental and practical: guard your finances, keep company with trustworthy people, stay tethered to family. And underneath it, one non-negotiable. “Never lose sight of who you are and where you came from.”
For a teacher named the best in a state half a world from home, the throughline is disarmingly simple. The awards were never the inheritance she wanted to leave. The students were.
