As National Teacher Appreciation Week winds down, one educator with the Greene County School District is ending her career after four decades.

Lisa Garnett is a Jefferson native, who graduated from Jefferson High School in 1980, who then went to Northwest Missouri State University for two years and transferred to Iowa State University, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in education. From her childhood, Garnett knew she wanted to be a teacher and she attributes Janet (Gilmore) Adamson and Suzanne Sievers for guiding her towards that career.

Garnett did her student teaching at inner-city Kansas City, Missouri, before starting her teaching career in 1985 in Malvern, Iowa. She moved to several locations after that, including the Omaha Public School District, substitute teaching in nine school districts in the Kearney, Nebraska area; followed by Julesburg, Colorado and then Sterling, Colorado and South Dakota, following her late husband’s job working for Cabela’s before his passing.

Garnett points out that she and her children moved back to Jefferson, where she taught with the Jefferson-Scranton School District and now the Greene County School District. Garnett has been a lifelong Food and Consumer Science teacher because her passion was helping students decide what they want to do for a career and make them as independent as possible before graduation. 

Garnett shares that her favorite part of being a teacher is having former students come back to visit and see her. She will miss the relationships with students the most when she retires. Garnett explains one vivid example of building a rapport with one student she had in her class.

“A student that, a few years ago, was struggling to get his stuff done, and I told him, ‘I’ll kick .’ you in the butt if you don’t get it done.’ And I think he knew me well enough that I probably would have if I’d been near him. But he did get it done and he called me, I was just getting ready to go into the middle school and we just, we both cried, because he had gotten everything done and he was going to graduate.”  

As Garnett looks forward to retirement, she offers this advice to students who are considering being in education.

“You have to truly enjoy working with kids to be able to be a teacher. That has to be a passion from the get go, because if you don’t enjoy working with kids, then education is not a field to go into. But you have to enjoy working with people and not everybody has that.”  

Garnett adds that in retirement, she is planning to visit former students and continue those relationships she had, but now outside of the classroom.