Three Teachers Who Make A Difference

Laura King: Central Campus

Fourth grade teacher Laura King was chosen as Central Campus Teacher of the Year for 2008.

King was born in Eastpoint and attended Brown Elementary, now Central Campus, as a child. She continued on to attend Apalachicola High School and Gulf Coast Community College and finally graduated from Florida State University.

She said she is pleased to be in a new classroom with a bathroom and a sink this year.

“I love my class. They’re very smart and a very high group of students,” she said.

King said she is, “excited but a bit nervous,” about winning the award.

“It seems like big shoes to fill. You feel like so many other people deserve the honor.” - By Lois Swoboda

Elinor Mount-Simmons: East Campus

Elinor Mount-Simmons, Teacher of the Year at East Campus in Carrabelle, says her students are highly motivated to achieve and who can blame them? With a teacher like Mount-Simmons, learning is bound to come alive.

Mount-Simmons is the creator of the program she teaches, the Academic Recovery Program (ARP), which provides a way for students who are potentially dropouts to graduate with the peer group they started with by studying on the fast track.

“I had been teaching for 25 years at Chapman when I was invited to come work with this program,” she said. “I thought it was already established when I agreed. I didn’t know I would be the one to set it up. This program is the answer to my prayers. The first year we had great success. Two boys graduated who might not have done so.”

Mount-Simmons, who was born in Panama City, says she got into teaching through the back door. She originally studied fashion merchandising and business.

“My mother was in charge of calling in substitutes in Bay County and she used to call me. I got sent to Cedar Grove Elementary and had the same group of second graders for three days. That was it. I heard about a job teaching fifth grade in Franklin County. Rose McCoy, who was assistant principal, hired me and I went back to school. Even though I got in through the back door, I thoroughly love it.” - By Lois Swoboda

Laura Baney: West Campus

In 1981, Laura Baney, Teacher of the Year on Apalachicola’s West Campus, became only the second contingent of Navy women to be placed on a ship.

Her job as a seaman on the destroyer tender U.S.S. Samuel Gompers back then was to work in the repair shop.

Today, more than 25 years later, her job as an ESE teacher is to tend to the emotionally and mentally impaired, make the needed repairs and ensure their difficulties don’t destroy them.

Now in her third year in the school system, Baney handles a case load of about 38 students in grades sixth through eighth, including students who have been classified as learning disabled, autistic, or emotionally or mentally impaired.

I love it, watching them become successful,” said Baney. “I really believe it’s a team effort.”

Baney calls paraprofessional Wanda Brannan “my right arm,” and together the women work with a core group of about a dozen middle school students who stay with them most of the day.

“Depending on severity, they’ll start off (in elementary school) with an ESE teacher and behavior modifications are put into place,” she said. “We try to get them to work longer and work specifically on the behavior and sit and complete tasks. The idea is to get them mainstreamed. The push is for every child to get a high school diploma.”

Originally from Livonia, outside of Detroit, Baney enlisted in the Navy after high school. During her years of service from 1980 to 1982, she traveled to such places as Hawaii, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Diego Garcia, Mauritius and Australia.

“It gave me a deep appreciation for how wonderful we have it in the US, and it was great to see other countries. It gave me an opportunity to go to other places I would never have been,” she said.

In 1990, Baney returned to college, and in 1998 earned a bachelor’s of science, and endorsement in special education for the emotionally impaired, from Eastern Michigan University.

“I knew I wanted to go into special education but I wasn’t aware of the variety of endorsements,” she said.

After working in a local classroom in nearby Ypsilanti, “I kind of felt that I found my niche,” she said. “It just felt right. I loved the kids, I loved the work I was doing with them and I knew that’s what I wanted to do.”

Baney, who worked for the previous two years in Carrabelle, is a strong proponent of year-round education, especially for ESE students. “They miss too much being off that amount of time,” she said. “When they come back, we end up re-teaching them.”

She said signs of learning and emotional difficulties can surface as young as pre-kindergarten. “This would be a child who is really aggressively acting out or the child who sits back in the corner and doesn’t talk with anybody else,” she said. “They sit outside the normal sphere of everyone else.

“Kids can be singled out because they’re not able to learn as quickly,” Baney said, noting that the schools do a complete psychological evaluation before assigning students to a particular educational track.

She noted that Franklin County is no different than other districts in trying to make the most with limited resources. “I found this to be true in any school system that I’ve worked in,” Baney said. “There’s not enough public funding and resources for our students in general.” - By David Adlerstein