Amy Telford went to SIU Carbondale to study advertising. She studied it in the communications building, a subspecialty within the school of journalism. She graduated, got married, moved back to the Salem area with her husband Doug, and discovered there wasn't much advertising work to be found. Rather than leave, she made a decision: go back to SIU. Commute 80 miles each way, five days a week, for two years, while Doug worked and kept the household going. Get the science teaching certification. Become a teacher.

"That was tough," she said.

She started at Sandoval Junior-Senior High School in 1994 and stayed 22 years, teaching science — and some language arts along the way. When a position opened at Salem Community High School, she made the move. She was initially hired to teach chemistry, but she’s since taught many courses at SCHS. She transitioned into the introductory science courses she's taught for the last five or six years: Lab Science and Science 1, a combination of life, physical, and earth science for freshmen and sophomores. It's become her wheelhouse. For two of those years, she co-taught with Ms. Pogue, a special education teacher. "I learned a lot from that," she said.

She's always kept learning. A federal school improvement grant at Sandoval brought her exposure to the Next Generation Science Standards and hands-on inquiry-based teaching: "It really opened my eyes to just different ways of teaching." More recently, she completed a five-year Master Teachers Fellowship in Environmental Sustainability through Noyce Teacher Scholarship program and SIU — two to three weeks of actual field research each summer, then bringing those discoveries back to the classroom. The second year fell during COVID and went largely remote, but the experience held. Amy also earned her Master Naturalist certification through the Illinois Extension program last year.

Amy graduated from Salem Community High School in 1982. Her parents were in the class of 1953. Her daughter Maggie — now 23 — also went through the school, was a competitive swimmer who reached national-level meets, and now coaches swimming at Centralia. Amy and Doug are both swim officials. Doug is also president of the local fair board; Amy works the exhibit building where people enter their jellies, jams, and quilts. She was a narrator in the William Jennings Bryan historical play this past summer. She calls bingo every Thursday at the community activity center.

"It's a vibe here," she said of Salem Community High School. "I like the culture." In retirement Amy wants to travel, grow a garden, and plans to work as a substitute teacher while continuing her community volunteering.

Jodi Childress had originally planned to study computer science — at Millikin University in Decatur. She spent a full 24 hours in a computer lab trying to get a program to work and arrived at a question: "Do I really want to be that isolated? I kind of need the human interaction." She already had a strong math background, and she played softball through college and had coached during the summers. Teaching math was a natural fit. She graduated from Salem High School in 1986, and she's been back teaching at the school for 32 years — with three years at Odin High School before that. 35 years total.

She's taught everything from foundational math to honors trigonometry and honors statistics. She also added computer science along the way: programming for several years, computer science principles for the last five or six. "I see the integration between math and computer science probably more than some of the other teachers do, just because I teach both," she said.

The evidence of that integration shows up in her family. Her son — 27 years old — recently moved from a cybersecurity consulting role into heading cybersecurity for a produce company called Fresh Edge. She noted the comparison dryly: "27 years old, he makes more than I do after 35 years of teaching." She has two sons; the other is in Indiana.

She coached softball at Salem for about 12 years, drawing on her playing days. She eventually gave it up because she was spending more time with other people's kids than her own. "I miss coaching to this day," she said. She's still in touch with former players on Facebook.

This is her last year. In June, she's moving to Foley, Alabama — just north of Orange Beach and Gulf Shores. She figures her sons might actually visit more if there's a beach involved. She's already earned a Code.org certification to train other teachers in computer science curriculum — keeping that option available, she said, "in case I got tired of the beach for a day, or it rained."

She's not one to sit still. She knows that about herself.

"I'll definitely miss interacting with the kids," she said. They keep you young. They keep the new slang coming. Her math department colleagues — the people she's seen nearly every day for three decades — will be harder to replace than she'll probably admit.