Laura Geier grew up in Ingraham, a small Clay County community right on the edge of Jasper County, and she played school as a kid. Arranged the stuffed animals, ran the lessons. She didn't go to Eastern Illinois University thinking about teaching, though — she enrolled to study business, took an economics class her first semester, found it didn't interest her, and switched majors. "I've never looked back. I really enjoy what I'm doing."

She student taught in Jasper County Schools in the fall of 1991, working with a fourth-grade class. That spring, she subbed. In the summer of 1992, she got married. That fall, she came back as a sixth-grade aide. In the school year 1993-94, she was hired to teach sixth grade — and the class she got was the same group of kids she'd student taught two years earlier when they were in fourth grade. "It was fun."

She meant that without qualification. It still reads that way 30 years later.

Over the course of her career, she moved through several grades: one year in sixth, four or five years in fifth, about ten or twelve years in third, and then the longest stretch in fourth. "I really enjoy fourth grade. Third and fourth grade is a sweet age." She's still there. She'll retire from there. The hundredth day of school passed on the Monday before Craig arrived; there were fewer than 80 days left.

She's been having a great year. "I'm having a great year. It's really —  a good year." Which is how you'd want to go out.

This is the only school district she has ever worked for. "This is the only place I've ever been." She noted that most of the people she started with are retired by now — she's among the last of that cohort still in the building.

If you calculate roughly 30 students per year over 30-plus years, the number of children who passed through her classroom approaches a thousand. Craig did the math in real time. She had never totaled it. "That's probably right," she said, turning it over. Each of those numbers is a person — a name, a face, a morning she welcomed them in.

Her husband is from Jasper County. They live on a farm. Their three children — ages 28, 26, and 25 when this was written, stair-stepped across three years — all came through Jasper County Schools. Both daughters went to SIUE in Edwardsville and now live in St. Louis. One has been a nurse at Barnes Hospital for seven years. "It's a big job." The son still lives at home and works locally. When Craig asked if any of them went into education, Laura said she'd suggested it to one daughter. The daughter was not interested.

The colleagues who stayed are a big part of why she stayed. "It's been a nice, friendly environment. People to work with." She doesn't dramatize this — it's just the quiet fact of having found a place that was worth showing up for every morning for more than three decades.

She describes Jasper County to outsiders the way most people here describe it: "Very welcoming, very friendly. People are willing to help other people." A place with churches and neighbors and a visible safety net, but more importantly, a can-do spirit underneath. Her own children came out of it as hard workers. She believes that's not incidental.

She plans to sub after retirement — she's too young and too restless to stop. "I like to be busy, and I like a routine." She knows the hardest moment won't be the last day of school. "I don't think it will hit until the fall, when everyone else is going back." What she'll miss then: the students' faces every morning, walking them in. And the colleagues. "I'm gonna miss seeing other adults and just — the kids, seeing the children, their faces every morning, welcoming them to school."

That's thirty years of mornings she's talking about. Close to a thousand kids. One school district. One career that started with a headache in a dark computer lab and ended in a fourth-grade classroom where, by all accounts, it was a very good year.