Arkansas’ school people |
In their early years as a married couple, my parents were "school people." That's what we always called them in our family. The word you hear these days is "educators."
My mother graduated from what's now Ouachita Baptist University in spring 1947. She was a year younger than my father, but he was a year behind her in school due to two years spent in the Army Air Corps during World War II. While Dad completed his senior year at Ouachita, Mom worked as business manager for Arkadelphia's new radio station.
When my father graduated in spring 1948, he accepted a job as coach (multiple sports in those days) at Newport High School. My mother was hired as an elementary teacher at Newport. I have a sister who was born in Newport. After several years there, my parents decided that two teachers' salaries weren't enough to raise a family. They joined the sporting goods business started by my father's older brother at Arkadelphia, where I was born and raised.
Dad traveled the state for the next five decades, selling athletic supplies to high schools. Though my parents were no longer employed by public schools, many of those who influenced me as a boy were school people. Dad was friends with superintendents and coaches across the state. When they came to Arkadelphia to do business, our whole family would often go to dinner with them.
I've been reminded in recent months just how much I like school people. I've talked to a bunch of them about Gov. Sarah Sanders' voucher scheme, which is hastening the death of rural Arkansas. I taped two episodes of the Southern Fried podcast with Glen Fenter, superintendent of the Marion School District.
Fenter, who previously took what had been a small technical school at West Memphis and transformed it into one of the state's top community colleges, is trying to inform Arkansans about the dangers of the voucher scheme.
Fenter comes from a family of school people. His father, Guy Fenter, was president of the Education Service Cooperatives of Arkansas from 1985-88 and retired from Western Arkansas Education Cooperative in 2015. Upon his retirement, the cooperative was renamed the Guy Fenter Education Service Cooperative.
Guy died in November 2016 at age 83. The elder Fenter was........