Mrs. Cindy Garraway is honored to be the adviser for The Talon! The 2024-2025 school year will mark her 23rd year teaching, and her 17th year at O’Connor teaching AP Literature, COM 100, Creative Writing, ELA 7-8, Newspaper, and Journalism. She is also an Adjunct for Rio Salado College teaching COM 100 and COM 110, online teacher for Aspire, and is the Education Technology Chair at OC. Born and raised in Illinois, she attended the University of Illinois (Go Illini!!) where she received her Bachelor of Arts degree. After living in Santa Barbara, California for two years, she decided to move back to Illinois to obtain her Master of Arts degree from Barat College of DePaul University. In 2015, she was awarded with the honor of being named Deer Valley Unified School District’s Teacher of the Year, and in 2016 was a recipient of Rio Salado’s Outstanding Adjunct Faculty Award, and again received this award in 2023. In addition, Mrs. Garraway was awarded with O’Connor’s teacher of the year at the end of the 2023 school year. Mrs. Garraway’s entire family is part of the Eagle family as her husband is lead security at OC along with the head JV football coach, and her daughters are students at OC (one is a junior and the other is a sophomore). Mrs. Garraway has always been an avid consumer of news and thoroughly enjoyed all of her Journalism classes taken in college, so she thrives on advising the talented, award-winning newspaper staff at OC.