RED BAY | As the final bell sounded last Friday to close out the 2021-22 school year, it also signaled the end of an era. When classes resume at Red Bay High School in August, for the first time in 51 years there will not be one of Nell Thompson’s daughters at the front of the classroom for the opening bell.
Janet Kennedy, the youngest of the Thompson trio that includes Dolores Sparks and Susan Ledbetter, closed out her 40-year teaching career last week, bringing an end to more than five decades of educational service from the Thompson family. All told, the three have given a combined 97 years of service to Red Bay High School and Red Bay Elementary. If you add the time where Sparks returned to serve as a substitute after her retirement, it brings that number to a full century. To go even further, add the years Sparks served as an instructor on the community college level in Alabama and Mississippi after she initially retired from Red Bay, and the tally is well over 100 years of service in education.
The path to teaching was a pretty simple one for Sparks, Ledbetter and Kennedy: Their mother told them to. For Sparks, though, it was her love of math that led her to the classroom as few other opportunities at that time would allow her to explore that passion.
“I wanted to work with math,” Sparks said. “And (teaching) was the only way I could think to use it, because girls didn’t do engineering back then. But mother made me sure teaching was a good thing to do.”
Ledbetter said she tossed a few career ideas her mother’s way, “but they didn’t fly.”
“We had other suggestions, but in the end, she knew us better,” Kennedy said.
Kennedy probably strayed the furthest from the classroom initially, working in a bank after college as there was not an opening for her preferred line of study. Inspired by former RBHS business teacher Barbara Cashion, Kennedy earned her degree in business education and initially went to work at a bank in Iuka after finishing at Florida State. One day, however, bank president J.P. Wilemon approached Kennedy and asked her what her degree was in. She said education, and he told her, “Go teach.” So, Kennedy got recertified to teach elementary and loved it.
Sparks, the oldest of the three, began her teaching career first, working in classrooms from Decatur to Hazel Green to Muscle Shoals, but had stepped away from the classroom as she began her family. Red Bay’s principal at that time, Estermann G. Butler, convinced her to come back home and begin teaching at Red Bay. She started teaching math classes in the high school in the spring semester of 1971. She retired after teaching at Red Bay for 32 years, but didn’t leave the classroom as she went on to teach classes at Northwest Community College in Senatobia, Miss., and serve as a fill-in teacher in both Red Bay and Russellville.
The following fall semester of 1971, Ledbetter joined the staff of Red Bay Elementary. It was midway through college that Ledbetter decided she wanted to teach elementary education.
“I just knew that was what I wanted to do, to work with young children,” Ledbetter said.
Speaking of students, as a fun side note, Kennedy had Sparks as a teacher in high school.
“I paddled her,” Sparks said with a broad smile.
“Many, many times,” Kennedy added, laughing as well. “She did not show any favoritism.”
The influence of others
A common theme quickly made evident in talking with these three is that their service in education stemmed from a love of working with and teaching students, helping point them toward their future. Kennedy, Ledbetter and Sparks are quick to deflect attention from themselves, though, pointing out how many other teachers – under whom they learned and with whom they taught – made their years in the classroom the joy and privilege they have been. They are hesitant to name names for fear they’ll leave out someone who deserves mention. Any discussion of their careers, though, has to include their teachers and coworkers.
“There have been so many great teachers who were mentors to us,” Kennedy said, “such as Mrs. Cashion. And Mrs. Katrine Moore was my second-grade teacher. How much more fun can you have there? And Jimmy and Brenda Hall, Irene Bolton and . . . there have just been so many who were such mentors to me. Then once I got into education, all of your co-workers play a role, too. Education is a field where you build with each other. Even after 39 years, if I didn’t have my co-workers . . . they’re the ones that help you and keep you going. If you were out there alone on an island, you’d sink.”
Sparks credited a former teacher, Harold Underwood, for helping her see her love of math. Kennedy valued her time teaching alongside Margie Pounders, who Kennedy also thoroughly enjoyed as a teacher while Kennedy was a student. Ledbetter said fellow third-grade teacher Mabel Kennedy was a major help to her in her first years of teaching.
The classroom where Kennedy taught has played a pivotal role in her life, too, and it’s the only room in which she has taught. Kennedy was a fifth-grade student when the elementary school building burned in 1967, and when the new building was built Kennedy’s sixth grade classroom was the very room in which she found herself teaching when she came to Red Bay. She began her student teaching under Tilda Sumerel, and when Sumerel moved to the third grade, Kennedy took over teaching fifth and sixth-grade science classes in the room where she started and has now ended her career.
Her career might have ended a little sooner had it not been for the renewed energy she found when Leigh Burks was named the new elementary principal.
“When we met for her introduction, she has so much energy, and I made the comment the next time Energizer does another commercial, she needs to be the Energizer Bunny,” Kennedy said. “I have never in my life seen anybody with that much enthusiasm and energy and she loves the kids. She is so dedicated, and I thought I might stay a year or two and see what it’s like under her, and she’s just made it so easy, so wonderful.”
The havoc brought by COVID extended her career further.
“I was not going to end my career like that,” Kennedy said, as COVID sent all students home in March 2020 and completely disrupted the end of the school year.
“I think she had planned on it before that,” Sparks added. “But you want to come out of (your career) happy, not like that.”
Happy memories
Along the way of their careers the three gained a storehouse of cherished memories. One that leapt to mind for Sparks was one time when she was celebrating a “0” birthday, Ledbetter got on the public address system in the office and announced it to the entire school. And Kennedy enjoyed in later years being able to combine her teaching with an annual trip to Dauphin Island. The trips – yes, they are an enjoyable trip to the beach – but they are also so much more as they provide an opportunity to help students see and understand in a way classroom study simply can’t.
“The course of study at that time was about the ocean and the waves,” Kennedy said. “How can you tell a child or student what the ocean sounds like, tastes like? And so, I heard about it (the opportunity) and I said, ‘Let’s do it.’”
It took fundraising to make the trips happen, and Kennedy cited the support from the City of Red Bay’s Education Fund and Brad Bolton and the Franklin County Community Development Commission in making the trips possible. She said a lot of parental work was involved as well, putting together lots of chicken dinner fundraisers to afford the trips. In that vein, Kennedy, Ledbetter and Sparks all three said the community’s boundless support has made teaching at the school and providing the educational opportunities possible, and they are all three grateful for that support.
Life after the classroom
Now, Kennedy is facing a new beginning that her sisters have already experienced. Sparks and Ledbetter both agreed that leaving the coworkers who had become their family was the most difficult part of retiring.
“I can’t imagine it,” Kennedy said about leaving, adding she does not know really what she plans to do now that her full-time work in the classroom is finished. Her sisters, with knowing smiles, say they don’t expect she’ll have all that time on her hands for long.
“I’ll tell her, just go and get busy and she won’t have any spare time,” Sparks said. “I never have any spare time, hardly.”
“There will be plenty to do,” Ledbetter added.
After 51 years of teaching at the school, the question of what their mother might have to tell them now that they have completed their careers brought laughs from all three.
“She’d probably be telling me to stay here,” Kennedy said.
“She’d have something down for you to do, that’s for sure,” Spark said.
That would fit in with who Nell Thompson was, as Sparks said the community meant the world to her. Thompson, whose father, Alvin Wilson, was mayor of Red Bay, served as city clerk and later was a member of the Red Bay City Council. Community service was important to Thompson, whose legacy can now be seen to have come full circle with her daughters’ careers of educating multiple generations of the community’s children.
“This town meant so much to her,” Sparks said. “She was always doing things for people and helping people with things, but she just loved her town.”“And she was a big advocate for education,” Ledbetter said. “I remember we didn’t really celebrate our graduations because she said, ‘You’re not through yet.’”
