Catherine Scott is pursuing her doctorate.

This is worth knowing upfront, because she is also preparing for retirement. Both things are true at the same time, and together they tell you more about her than any summary of her career could.

The doctorate is in curriculum and instruction — the discipline most directly connected to the work she has done for twenty-four years in Southern Illinois classrooms. Not a credential for advancement. Not a next step. Just a deeper understanding of the thing she decided, somewhere along the way, was worth the rest of her life.

Getting there was accidental. Raised in Oak Park near Chicago, Scott arrived at Southern Illinois University Carbondale as a psychology major with research ambitions. She planned to go on for a PhD. She was grading student-teacher work in her master's program when she realized she had never actually been inside a classroom herself. She arranged to volunteer in one — just to see what it was like, to understand the environment she was studying from a distance.

The first day changed everything.

"The first day that I was in there, I was like, this is it. This is home to me."

She shifted into special education and spent the next twenty-one years at Cairo CUSD 1 before arriving at Meridian three years ago — where she now teaches, participates in the district's strategic planning process, and somehow also works toward that doctorate.

She describes what special education actually is with the patience of someone who has corrected the misunderstanding many times.

"Special education is what education strives to be — trying to meet the needs of every student where they are."

Some students process information differently. Some carry trauma. Some arrive exhausted from circumstances no child should have to navigate. Scott has had students couch-surfing, students being raised by grandparents in poor health, and students holding together more composure than most adults could manage. She does not claim to have saved everyone. She does claim to have shown up for everyone.

"Every kid's worth it," she said. "Every kid's worth it."

What makes her most impatient is the assumption — still common — that special education students simply aren't intelligent. Her response is direct.

"They learn differently. They're not you. They're not dumb kids."

She is equally quick to defend parents, pushing back against the reflexive cynicism that casts families as indifferent or disengaged.

"People can get mired down in the negativity. I have never found that."

Fixing public education, she acknowledges, is a complicated proposition. "It's like how to eat an elephant," she said. "One bite at a time." She believes it has to involve everyone — teachers, administrators, families, community — and she believes the strategic planning process underway at Meridian is a meaningful attempt at exactly that.

What impresses her most about it is who is in the room.

"There are community members there. I've never really seen that before. That's really powerful."

She pairs it with something she observed this past Saturday at graduation: every board member was there. She sees them at games. She sees administrators at events that no one would check their attendance at.

"It feels like you have a lot of buy-in," she said. "People really feel like it's important for me to be there."

About the planning documents themselves, she is clear-eyed: "Putting those words down has a certain power. But you have to kind of live that." Not write it and shelve it. Live it.

Scott commutes to Meridian from LaCenter, Kentucky — a detail she mentions without drama, as if the drive is simply part of what the work requires. She is officially retiring at the end of this year. She is also fairly certain she won't stay away.

"I would be bored out of my mind," she said.

She talks about substitute teaching, about continuing to be a voice, about staying involved, however the opportunity allows. After twenty-four years inside classrooms that required everything she had, stepping away entirely simply does not fit who she is.

Not yet. Possibly not ever.

"I'm committed to continuing," she said, "for the rest of my life. In some capacity."

The doctorate will take care of the rest.