Clara Taylor is a senior at Joppa-Maple Grove, and she already knows what comes after graduation.

"I'm going to go to college to be a special education teacher."

There's no uncertainty in it. The reason is just as direct. "I've got a bunch of siblings in special ed," she says. "And I want to be able to help them."

She has nine siblings. She is not the oldest. Several of her brothers and sisters are in special education programs — which means that for most of Clara's life, she's been surrounded by exactly the kind of need she now wants to dedicate her career to meeting. She's watched from up close what support looks like when it works, and what it looks like when it doesn't.

She'll be the first person in her family to go to college. The first to teach. She's considering Murray State or West Kentucky Community and Technical College, hasn't fully decided yet — but the direction is set.

Asked how it feels to be the first, she gives a one-word answer.

"Happy."

And when the conversation turns to her younger siblings — the ones who will see her leave, watch her go to college, watch her come back as a teacher — she answers as if she's already picturing it.

"They'll be proud of you," she says.

She's not imagining a performance. She's imagining something more useful — a path someone in her family can actually see and follow. That's not nothing. In a family of ten kids, several of them navigating special education, a sister who becomes a special ed teacher is the closest thing to a blueprint.

She has a favorite teacher here — Mr. May, who teaches English. She likes the class. Right now, they're working through Macbeth, and she'll tell you it's her favorite thing they've read. She doesn't elaborate much. She doesn't need to.

A few hallways away, Jeff Goddard has been watching students build things for twenty-five years.

His classroom is the auto body shop. What gets made there is visible — metal, paint, the transformation of a damaged vehicle into something that looks brand new. But the more important transformations, Jeff will tell you, aren't always the ones you can see on the surface.

"It was scary," he says of his first year. He had a good group, though. Curious students who were genuinely interested — who didn't want to leave when class was over. That energy steadied him.

Early on, two students brought in trucks they wanted to repaint and repair. Both had real damage. Both took most of the year. One came out copper-colored — "It looked brand new," Jeff says. Other teachers wandered in just to look at it. A third student had been working alongside those two, learning as he went. He came back the following year as a senior and brought in his own truck. That time, he did most of the work himself.

Years later, that student reached out. He hadn't gone into auto body — but what he'd learned in the shop had stayed useful in ways he hadn't expected. He was offered a job at a dealership because of the skills from that class.

"I was kind of impressed with that," Jeff says.

That's an understatement. You can hear the quiet satisfaction in it.

Another student whom Jeff thinks about struggled for almost his entire junior year. Low skill level at the start, but persistent in a way that Jeff remembers clearly — wouldn't quit, kept going at it over and over. Midway through his senior year, something shifted. The effort started producing results. The work started flowing.

Now he does auto body for a living. He brought a vehicle to the school not long ago to show Jeff what he'd done.

"You could tell he was proud of it," Jeff says. The student isn't a big talker. He didn't say much. He didn't need to.

"It's fun to watch students grow in what they can do," Jeff says, when asked to sum up twenty-five years. "It's just been really rewarding doing that."

Clara, at the beginning of her path. Jeff, deep into his. Both are shaped by the same fundamental instinct — that the people who need the most support deserve the most commitment.

One of them is heading into the world to give it. The other has been giving it for a quarter century and shows no sign of stopping. Clara is also a female student in Goddard’s class of whom we are very proud.