Kristin Churney
Milton Pope Elementary School
Marseilles IL
K-8th Grade Special Education
Email: kristin@iceberg.org
K-8th Grade Special Education
Email: kristin@iceberg.org
In May of 1989, I was given the ticket to becoming a special educator. I finally, after five long years, received my diploma from Western Illinois University. Of course I wanted to "find myself" before I actually got a job. I thought that I would travel around Europe on my own and see all of those great wonders. Then reality, my father, struck. He wanted to know how I was going to finance this adventure all on my own. That is when I realized the inevitable, I had to get a resume together and I had to find a job. The deadline was coming soon, it was now July and I had not even sent out one resume. I gathered names and addresses of the people to contact, then my journey was off.
I should have known walking into my first and only interview that this was going to be a disaster. The principal was desperate and offered me the job right there on the spot. I excepted and that is when I became a part of the self-supporting working world. This would also be the time that I would finally grow up and realize that not everyone had as good of a life as I had growing up.
I spent my first year teaching high school and junior high behavior disordered students. Boy was that a shock for a first year teacher who was ready to cure the world. I thought that I could be the one that could make a difference in the lives of my students. As far as my students were concerned, most of them were only at school because the truancy officer was on their case to be at school. A few were there to learn, and a few were there because it was better than being at home. Looking back to that year, I was the one who learned the most.
My next two years were spent teaching high school and junior high. These schools were thirty-five miles apart and it seemed like I spent more time driving between the two schools than I did teaching. I also found myself misplacing many papers and books throughout these two years. Many of these papers have since resurfaced. From where, no one seems to know.
It was also during this time that I met my husband, Scott. Let's just say that we met at a local establishment during my Christmas break. We have been married for four years now. No kids yet, but we do have a Sheltland Sheepdog who thinks that he should go everywhere that we go.
My final destination so far in my teaching career is at Milton Pope. I have been the resource special education teacher here for four years. It is also where I got my introduction to computers. One of my parents donated a computer to my class, pc, because they were tired of us getting all of the leftovers, IIGs that a neighboring school was getting rid of . The rest of the computer part is history. I keep on taking computer classes whenever I can. I would like to get the board to allow us to get the internet into our classrooms, or at least get one of the computers hooked up. Such is the life of a small school special ed teacher.