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My Hopes for the New School Year
I always start out with hope for those still in our educational system.
It’s that time of year again. The time to go back to school is upon us. Am I a teacher? No, not in the classroom. Am I a parent of students? Yes, but they’ve all graduated from their k-12 educations. And our oldest finished his Ph.D. degree this summer. At this point, I no longer have any children in ANY educational system.
That said, my heart is that of a teacher and I greatly value education. For twenty years, I volunteered in a variety of capacities in our district. I had a child in our resident school district for that long due to the spacing of our sons. Thus, I got very involved.
During those twenty years, I taught. I was a substitute teacher for grades k-6 for six years. I also taught elementary students in an after-school garden club for fifteen years, taught a writer’s circle for six years, held a student book club for five years, and did community education for school groups for two decades. Those are the contributions that I valued the most. There were others.
A teacher without a license or a classroom. That was me. I had a license at one time — a nursing license with national certification as a pediatric nurse practitioner. When I got another master's degree in environmental…
