A year ago she was working in corporate America. Two years ago she was living in an RV. Sixteen years ago she was setting records on a college lacrosse team.
And yet all we can talk about is her name.
Students opened their schedules in mid-July, tilting their heads in confusion as they scrolled upwards to read the name of one of Shorecrest’s latest additions in jet black ink: “Ba—lisalisa? Balisa—Lisa? Balisa and lisa??”
At the beginning of this year, Shorecrest hired six new US teachers, including the new US STEAM and Robotics Teacher Sarah Balisalisa. Since then, she has significantly changed the robotics and computer programming scene at Shorecrest.
(Cole Oman)
But STEM wasn’t always her main priority. Balisalisa has a passion for lacrosse. In middle school, she played on an all-boys lacrosse team because her school didn’t have one for girls.
“Seventh and eighth grade, I was the girl that would whip the helmet off, and the long hair would come out, and [the boys would say], ‘Oh my gosh, Tommy, you got beat by a girl,’” she said.
Balisalisa went on to play D2 lacrosse at Chestnut Hill College where she still holds the record for the most shots and the most goals in four years.
After college, she began her career conducting government research on recycling. She worked to recycle the rare earth oxides found inside non-LED light bulbs. She then got a job at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) working as a volatile organic chemist until she had her second child.
“As I finished work for the EPA, and I had my daughter, it was one of those moments where it was like, maybe with two kids, I’d like to go back to school and teach. So I went back, and I did two masters in two years,” said Balisalisa. With a master’s in Biology and Secondary Education, she began her teaching career.
After a handful of successful years teaching, Balisalisa left it all in 2021 to travel the U.S. in a 53-foot RV. Along the way, she homeschooled her three children, sharing her adventures on her YouTube channel called “Our Best Life Family” with almost 40,000 subscribers.
These years of playing highly competitive team sports, working as a government scientist, and hearing the perspectives of hundreds of people across the country have been enormously helpful to who she is as a teacher.
“[Her experiences] really shape her to teach through anything, and [to be able to] help with anything,” freshman Noah Eichenbaum said.
In 2024, after working in corporate America for a few years, Balisalisa found her way back to teaching.
“I really missed those light bulb moments,” she said.
And, to her, Shorecrest felt like the perfect place to witness them. Balisalisa said that despite the vast number of schools she interviewed all over the East Coast, Shorecrest just felt right.
She said, “It was the right place, the right time, the right school, and then the right people to get to [work with] between Ms. Giroud and Dr. Baralt. [It was] just the right people to work with.”
Balisalisa has now been working at Shorecrest for almost a full year, sprinkling her wide variety of experiences in life into the Shorecrest STEM program.
“She really loves to teach,” said Eichenbaum. “You can see that from how she tries to take everything and turn it into a lesson that [students] can learn from and apply to other things.”
