Gregory Kraus was ambushed in his own classroom and marched to the school gym, where hundreds of students were waiting to scream his name.
Kraus, 47, an automotive technology teacher at Amistad High School in Indio, California, had no warning that last Friday would be anything except ordinary. An administrator interrupted his morning class, pulled him aside under the guise of a budget discussion, and handed his students to a counselor. What awaited him in the gym was the $100,000 grand prize from the 2026 Harbor Freight Tools for Schools Prize for Teaching Excellence.
He is one of only 25 educators nationwide to claim the award, which honors public high school skilled-trades teachers. The prize splits between Kraus and his program: $30,000 goes to him personally, while $70,000 feeds directly into Amistad’s career and technical education department.
“This program is my passion,” Kraus told the Merced Sun-Star. “I came into this with just the mindset of, ‘I want to change the world in a positive way, one student at a time.'”
That mission traces back to a pivotal decision made years earlier, when Kraus was a young single father desperate to support his daughter. The practical skills he had absorbed in his own high school automotive classes launched him into a 15-year industry career, including a long stretch at a Honda dealership. The work paid the bills, but something kept gnawing at him.
His mother eventually pushed him toward teaching. Kraus laughed at first — he held no college degree. She argued that his hands-on industry experience was precisely what Career and Technical Education programs needed. He listened, enrolled, and earned a master’s degree in Educational Administration from CSU San Bernardino.
For nine years now, Kraus has built Amistad’s automotive program from the ground up. Every single one of those years, he submitted an application to Harbor Freight. Every year, he failed to advance past the opening round. The repeated rejections only sharpened his resolve.
The breakthrough arrived this spring. Past graduates of his program have already landed jobs at Tesla, Toyota, and Boeing. The $70,000 program infusion will expand equipment, materials, and opportunities for current students.
Kraus’s own biography embodies the program’s promise: a kid who learned to turn wrenches in shop class, raised a daughter on those wages, then returned to the classroom to pass the same lifeline forward. The surprise assembly in the gym, staged with his students as co-conspirators, collapsed that decades-long arc into a single screaming moment.
The Harbor Freight Tools for Schools Prize for Teaching Excellence has distributed millions to skilled-trades educators since its founding. The 2026 cycle drew thousands of applications from public high school teachers across the country. Kraus’s persistence through eight prior rejections made him an outlier even among winners.
Kraus has not publicly disclosed how he will spend his $30,000 personal share. The program’s $70,000 allocation will be directed toward expanding the automotive technology curriculum at Amistad High School.