Laura Caillouet-Weiner remembers walking down the hall at Jefferson Elementary School as a student teacher in the spring of 1981. Then-Principal Richard Sears stopped her and asked, “What are you going to do next fall?”
Caillouet-Weiner shrugged at the obvious question. She’d recently graduated from Emporia State University. “Get a job.”
“Second, third or fifth?” he asked.
She’d considered none of those options. She had planned to be a home economics teacher, but the world was shifting away from traditional homemaking classes. Maybe she’d be a middle school teacher instead. Her parents thought she’d be a good elementary teacher.
A year of student teaching first-graders with Marge Norman opened her mind to the possibility of working with young children.
“They’re just starting to learn how to be independent,” she said. She enjoyed watching students blossom and discover themselves.
On that fateful afternoon, she picked second grade.
Forty-two years later, Caillouet-Weiner said goodbye to teaching.
Counting an average of 20 students per year, about 840 7- and 8-year-olds have passed through her classroom. For more than four decades, she’s taught them to read, write and do math. She taught philosophies and skills she hopes her students will carry with them the rest of their life: Be respectful. Be responsible. Be trustworthy. Be kind.
A poster on the wall, “My School Pledge,” reminds students: “I am here to learn all I can, to try my best and be all I am.”
CAILLOUET-WEINER spent nearly all of her teaching years at Jefferson.
She never left second grade. She wanted to, once. Jefferson had an opening for a teacher at another grade level, and she told former Principal Ken McGuffin, “I might like to try another grade.”
“No, you’re suited for this level,” he told her.
So she stayed. And stayed.
She became part of “the Jefferson gang,” with longtime teachers such as the “Lindas” (Johnson, Garrett, Brocker), along with Vickie Tholen, Daryl Sigg and others.
