Antoinette began her career as an educator in 1983 where she taught English, literature and math at Owyhee Combined School and later became a vice principal. In 1993 she helped to establish the Spring Creek Junior High/High School as a vice-principal. As a new principal in 1997, Mrs. Cavanaugh was selected to plan, design and open the first middle school in Elko County School District at the Spring Creek Middle School. In 2002, Antoinette became the Director of Federal and Special Programs for Elko County School District, and in 2003, she was selected as the Superintendent of Schools for Elko County. She remained the superintendent until 2010 when she retired.
According to the Nevada Indian Commission, Antoinette was the first Native American in the history of Nevada to become a public school district superintendent. She has many educational awards reflecting service to public education at the state and national level. She earned recognition from the National Association of Secondary School Principals as Nevada’s Assistant Principal of the Year. In 2001 she was named Nevada’s “Best of Education Principal” by the Reno Gazette Journal. In 2007, Antoinette was named, “Nevada’s Superintendent of the Year,” by the Nevada State School Board Association. In January 2010, Antoinette’s educational journey was a featured profile article entitled, “An Enormous Leap from the Reservation,” in the national American Association of School Administrators’ publication, The Administrator. At the 2014 Nevada Department of Education American Indian/Alaska Native Education Summit, Antoinette received the “Pesa Namanedu” Award which means, in the Paiute language, “Something that has been done well.”
Antoinette, from 2013-2019 served eight Western Shoshone Tribes of Nevada as an educational consultant through Barrick Gold Mines. She provided professional education services to partner tribes and worked with Shoshone children/tribal members to improve their academic performance and planned and scheduled higher education visitations and provided career training opportunities. In a 2015 special edition of Beyond Borders, a Barrick publication, her history and educational work with Western Shoshone youth was featured in an article entitled, “The Life Changer: Antoinette Cavanaugh inspiring Western Shoshone youth to Dream Big.”
In 2020, Antoinette, served as the Interim CEO for the Shoshone Paiute Tribes of the Duck Valley Indian Reservation and currently is pursuing her Ph.D. from the University of Nevada Reno in Education Leadership with a focus on higher education and she has been named a Dean’s Graduate Fellow under the Tribal Student Program for the 2023-24 academic year.
