Iola High School’s new family and consumer sciences teacher, Sharon Frankenbery, decided early on that, unlike the bevy of other women in her family, she wouldn’t end up a teacher.
Interested in clothing from the start, in the middle 1960s the Thayer-native received a degree in fashion merchandising from Pittsburg State University. “I thought it sounded glamorous. But of course it’s a very difficult field to get into. You start out as a retailer and try to claw your way up to the top.
“At that time, the Joneses had a big department store in Pittsburg. I worked there and did displays. Before I graduated, they sent me to Kansas City to interview at the [flagship] Jones Store up there. Now, this is back when you could get away with discriminating. The guy there sees that I’m engaged. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we’re really only interested in people that we know are going to be with us for 30 years. I see you’re getting married — you’re probably not going to be here that long.’ And of course I was pretty much a timid kid from the country, so I said, meekly, ‘OK.’ And then I left and that was the end of that.
“Anyway, they can’t do that now. At least not overtly.”
It wasn’t exactly the end of that pursuit, however. Frankenbery went on to receive a master’s degree in clothing and textiles from Kansas State University. “If somebody told me in high school that I would go on to write a thesis on textiles — well, actually, I wouldn’t have known what a thesis was.”
But in 1969, Frankenbery followed her husband — who collected his own degree in agriculture at the same time — back to the family farm in Wilson County, where she bore and raised two sons, and buried her ambition to work in high fashion.
“If I’d been in a bigger city or a more populous area, maybe I could have at least done textile research, I don’t know.
“Actually,” remembered Frankenbery, “do you know what I first wanted to be when I grew up? An airline stewardess.” These were the days of pencil skirts and pillbox hats and ashtrays on the plane’s narrow armrests. “At the time I went to high school, what were the options for women? Nurse — well, that wasn’t for me. Teaching — no, I didn’t want to go into teaching. And then stewardess. I just figured it was a way to see the world.”
But fate’s mordant joke was to make Frankenbery not only a teacher — she taught FCS (formerly home economics) at Fredonia High School for 31 years — but a good one, and one with a wide reputation.
Since “retiring” from Fredonia three years ago, the popular teacher has been called on to cover for an FCS instructor on maternity leave in Yates Center; she was then asked to temporarily reassume her position in Fredonia after a teacher there was dismissed; soon after that, she was teaching a class at Altoona-Midway; and now, for this semester only, Iola has asked Frankenbery to lead its program until the current student teacher, Brianna Esslinger, finishes up at Pitt State and assumes the role full time in January.
There is something proprietary in Frankenbery’s willingness to continually interrupt her retirement to return to a course of study that still suffers under the housewifely stereotypes of home ec. And she admits to feeling protective toward a class, which, especially in lean economic times, maintains only the most precarious hold on a district’s course catalogue.
“That is my biggest fear. And that is one of the reasons that I have come into these schools when they’re in between teachers. Because if they don’t have a teacher, they’re going to close the program. And that has happened in some small communities. That was one of the reasons I went to Altoona, and one of the reasons I let them persuade me to come here
“This is a field with a crying demand for teachers. We have a real shortage, because there are so many in my age category that are at retirement age, and we’re not getting enough to replace those that are leaving.”
According to Frankenbery, Iola’s FCS curriculum dwells on four important categories of learning: “Family and community service,” which instructs students in the “soft,” interpersonal skills required to excel in the labor force; “culinary arts”; “education and training,” which highlights the option of teaching as a career; and “early childhood development.”
“We still can’t attract the males into our parenting classes, even though young men really need those skills. I always tell students that parenting is going to be your most important job, and so many people are just not equipped to be parents.”
The goals of the Family and Consumer Sciences program, says Frankenbery, are basic but the content the course imparts to its students is “essential.” “We teach skills that everybody can use, but that not everybody gets at home. It’s a vital program, I think. It’s life skills, you know, for life.”
Teacher offers lifetime of experience
