By Samantha Sinclair
CNI News Service
One thing Candace Oliver will miss when she retires from teaching is the key to her classroom.
“It not only unlocked my door, but it unlocked 30 years of some of the most stressful, difficult, demanding, but yet sweetest, fulfilling and best memories of my life,” she said.
That door was decorated with butterflies as the last days of the school year approached — something she picked up from another teacher — with a butterfly fluttering away each day to count down the days left for her students.
It’s usually an exciting time, but when she looked at the 19 butterflies remaining on her kindergarten classroom door before meeting with Lavonia Elementary Principal Brad Roberts about her retirement, she realized those butterflies represented the last days of 30 years.
“I can’t imagine it coming to an end,” Oliver said. “It’s been my life… I’ve poured my life into every classroom I ever had.”
While her professional career started 30 years ago, she actually started teaching her baby dolls when she was 4 years old.
“I was a great teacher back then,” Oliver said.
She taught them all the time, and believes it was God telling her that was her direction in life.
“God orchestrated that from the beginning that I was to be a teacher,” she said.
She later wanted to be as great a teacher as Ernestine Lee, who taught her English in sixth grade at Lavonia Elementary.
As an elementary student, she was also inspired by her principal, Boyd Outz, who always had a piece of chalk in his pocket to be ready to teach when he entered a classroom.
But, she thinks what sealed the deal was when she took Spanish at Franklin County High School with Leanne Henderson.
“She was the one who made me fall in love with a second language,” Oliver said.
Her original degree was in Spanish education, which covered kindergarten through 12th grade.
Her first year as a teacher was at Commerce High School, and it was a tough year.
She was close in age to her students, creating some issues.
In fact, when she and her husband — Jason, who is now the athletic director at Franklin County High School — chaperoned the prom, the photographer placed the photos of her in with the student photos instead of the faculty photos.
She then went to Habersham County, where they were implementing the Foreign Language in Elementary Schools, or FLES, program. She taught at Demorest and Baldwin elementary schools.
“That’s how I fell in love with the younger students,” Oliver said.
She said it was a great program until it ended.
She knew she didn’t want to go back to teaching high school, so she got her master’s in elementary education and started teaching at Commerce Elementary.
She loved teaching and living in Commerce, but she and her husband wanted to go back to where they grew up.
“We always knew we wanted to come back home,” she said. “This was home.”
In 2000, they came back, with Oliver teaching in the elementary school she went to.
In her 22 years in Franklin County Schools, she’s also taught at Central Franklin Elementary, and when it closed, taught at Carnesville.
She enjoyed teaching Spanish, and found a different way to use her Spanish education in the kindergarten setting. There would be students starting kindergarten who could not speak a word of English.
Not only would she teach English to Spanish-speaking students, but she would teach Spanish to English-speaking students.
“We kind of worked together,” Oliver said.
Over the years, she’s been named teacher of the year twice — in 1999 at Commerce and in 2012 at Central Franklin.
When she started teaching, she was the youngest. Now, she’s “the mama” of the other teachers, and the next oldest kindergarten teacher is the same age as her oldest child.
But, that’s not all that’s changed. Her first year teaching, she had a typewriter and correction tape.
There was a Xerox machine to make copies and die cut machine to cut out letters for bulletin boards.
Instead of a SMART board, she had an overhead projector.
“There’s been a lot of things that made life easier for sure,” she said.
She likes that technology allows her to organize class parties and parent conferences without having to send home slips of paper.
Her first year at Lavonia Elementary included a significant event.
She remembers sitting in her classroom when teachers were told they could type a note on the computer and send it to the office.
“It’s called email,” she remembered being told. “That was pretty cool. I watched email be born at Lavonia Elementary School.”
When she first started teaching, she was told she should keep a book of all the things children say.
“And I wish I had done that,” Oliver said “I’ll miss all the little things they say.”
Even though she’s not sure if her students will remember her, once they are her students, they are always her students, she said.
She enjoys getting to see former students on athletic fields as she helps her husband, and seeing them graduate.
One day while helping her husband, a very big young man came up behind her and tapped her on the shoulder.
He said, “Miss Oliver, do you remember me?”
She looked into his eyes, and saw that he was one of the little boys she once had as a kindergarten student at Central Franklin Elementary.
She said sometimes as she watches her kindergarten students on the playground, she can tell they will be athletes.
She sees teaching and being involved with athletics as her family’s ministry — ever since her husband’s first coaching job in Commerce when she was told by the head coach’s wife about getting involved, she’s been by her husband’s side.
Her four children have gotten involved, too, and have become athletes themselves.
“Our family always tried to stay together,” she said.
She’s always fit her family in to whatever she was doing, and is retiring to put her family first.
Her husband needs her help, her parents need her help, and she wants to spend time with her seven grandkids.
She also wants to be able to enjoy her youngest son’s senior year of high school, and her youngest daughter’s eighth grade year.
“I’m excited to enjoy their lasts,” she said.
Oliver will miss her classroom — everything in the classroom was put together over 30 years, and there are some items that are more than 30 years old.
She’s proud to hand over those treasures to someone else, but a little sad, too.
“It’s exciting to know I was a tiny little piece in their journey,” Oliver said. “So, perhaps I did make a difference.”