Group serves retired MC teachers

For some Madison County teachers, retirement does not mean an end to an interest in students. Though the Madison-Greene Retired Teachers Association is a nonprofit organization that helps its members manage retirement accounts and healthcare options, its members – former teachers – still talk about their classroom days and the changes they have witnessed throughout the years.

The teachers involved in the group still keep up with the educational world either through volunteering or friendships with current teachers.

“What a kindergartener does now and what they did 20 years ago is altogether different and now when kids leave high school, if you’re in the (advanced) group you’ve already had calculus and used to, you didn’t have calculus in high school,” local chapter President Jill Quinley said. “I think the curriculum has moved down, or stepped up, which helps in your preparation for college.”

But while members find today’s students to be more prepared, they also said the students are more stressed.

“A lot of pressure is put on them by their parents,” said Quinley. “(Students) must excel and that’s not always a good thing for them, they’re pressured too much not only from an educational standpoint but also from home at a certain level.”

Though methods and the pressures on students may have changed, the group members still said that ideals behind teaching remain the same.

“Teaching is giving of yourself,” Quinley said. “Plus, when you leave in the afternoons that’s not the end of your day – in my 26 years of teaching every night there was additional work to be done and the weekends were always for planning for the upcoming week. It’s a very time consuming profession and you truly have to enjoy it to stay in it.”
The organization however, is not just about remembering the past or lives spent in the classroom. The two-countywide “local” organization is part of a larger state organization, according to Quinley. The Madison-Greene chapter belongs to the state organization, though it does not have to, because it gives the group better lobbying power.

“It’s really important that we have a lobbyist,” Quinley said in a recent interview. “That’s is our contact (person), that’s our conduit to what’s going on in the legislature and that is very important.”

The group’s treasurer, Joyce Gentry, agreed.

“That person (the state group’s lobbyist) is protecting how they invest that money, our retirement,” Gentry said at the same meeting.

The Madison-Greene association was started in 1974 with 40 members, according to the group’s records from that period. One of the original members, Ruth Moore, 97, still attends the meeting. The membership has shrunk to 28 members in recent years, but there is hope of attracting new members with the idea that teachers no longer have to be retired to buy into the group’s state retirement plan, according to former French teacher Linda Twyman.

“I would like to see more people do it,” said Twyman. “But sometimes people are just so busy, that they don’t have time for another (group). That’s one of the things we want, is to get more people into it.”

The group has two meetings a year – in May and September, and uses its membership dues to fund a $500 scholarship for a Madison County or Greene County student going to college to study education. However, the group does not do fund-raising projects during the year.

“We try to encourage young people to go into education,” Twyman said. “A lot of them now want to go into professions where they’ll make a lot of money – we encourage young people to become educators.”

Though the group only meets semiannually, its members tend to stay involved with one another and active in the community.

“A lot of our members are volunteers in the schools and do things like (the) Breakfast Buddies program or help with reading,” Twyman said. “I know people do various volunteer (programs) that are still in association with the schools and helping young people, especially those that don’t have that encouragement at home. The one that I work with … we just help (students) with their homework. It might be students who don’t have someone at home that’s going to help them because their parents are working or whatever, (but) it’s an avenue to continue to work with students.”

For information, contact President Jill Quinley at (540) 948-4304. The group’s next meeting is in May (the time and location will be announced later).