Madison Davis was sitting at her new desk — the room still set up the way the previous teacher left it, her own things not yet moved in — when it finally clicked.

"OMG," she thought. "This was my third-grade classroom."

She'd walked past the room once without it registering. The second time she sat down, stared at the wall, and the whole thing landed.

She teaches third grade now. At the same school where she was a student. Down the hall from people who were her teachers. Including, for three classes in high school, Teresa Stacey.

This year, both of them received the Illinois State Board of Education's Those Who Excel award of recognition— Madison as an early career educator in just her third year of teaching, Teresa in her 33rd.

Neither one saw it coming.

Madison's nomination arrived in an email from a colleague. She had no warning.

"I just had an email one day. And I was like, whoa, this is awesome."

Her path to teaching wasn't obvious from the start. In her senior year, she sat with her Du Quoin High School guidance counselor with a list of possible careers — pediatrician, finance, others — none of which felt right. She never mentioned teaching.

The counselor looked at her and said, "Just based on how you interact — just conversation with you — you're gonna be a teacher. I'm just telling you, this is what you need to go do."

Madison went home that night and declared as elementary education.

"That was literally it."

She's a Golden Apple scholar — a competitive Illinois scholarship that comes with a condition: five years teaching at a low-income school district. She's now two years into her commitment at Du Quoin, and when she tries to imagine a different career path, she comes up empty.

"I can't think of one."

Teresa's nomination came from her principal, Eric Kirkpatrick. The timing was striking. She had just returned home from the hospital — her husband had undergone an amputation — after 15 months of treatment that took them to St. Louis weekly for chemotherapy. She taught as many days as she could, rationing sick days carefully, knowing retirement was close.

He passed away on Christmas Eve.

When the first day back came in January, Principal Diana Rea addressed the faculty. She told them she'd seen who was in the visitation line — two hours long. "There was just as much Du Quoin as there was Sesser," she said. Teresa is from Sesser. "I was very proud of our school for turning out for Teresa."

Teresa has been at Du Quoin for 32 of her 33 years in teaching — a career that started partly because her mother ran Small World Fashions, a children's clothing chain with four stores across southern Illinois, including one in Du Quoin. At 16, Teresa drove herself here for a summer job. She never fully left.

She teaches Family and Consumer Science — life skills, cooking, and child development. Elective courses, which means students choose to be there. And for a long time, students sought her out specifically. Madison was one of them. She took three of Teresa's classes.

"She loved her kids," Madison says. "Everybody knew it. She's one you don't forget when you graduate."

Teresa has stories to prove the reach of that. One student gave her a hard time throughout his time in her foods class — including getting caught cheating, right in front of the principal, on recipe cards Teresa had already marked with a highlighter on the back. He failed the course.

Three years later, he ran across a parking lot in Christopher in the snow and knocked on her car window.

"He said, 'You were trying to teach me how the world was going to treat me. I thought it was just you being mean. This world out here is hateful. No one's going to cut me a deal. And you tried to tell me that, and I didn't listen.'"

She cried from Christopher to Sesser.

"Most teachers wait their entire career for one kid to come back and say that," she says. "And I've had it over and over. That's what makes every day worth it."

Her husband used to notice the shift as they'd cross into Du Quoin. "Once we hit that city limit, you're a teacher," he'd say. "I see a teacher's face show up in the car."

He wasn't wrong.