The decorated veteran who cares

The other day Jericho Price, one of Almenia Freeman Warren’s eighth-grade advanced students, Googled her on the Internet and, after reading about her many accolades, asked his teacher what she was doing at Prescott Middle School.

Warren spent more than two decades teaching top students, including Gov. Bobby Jindal and Secretary of State Jay Dardenne at Baton Rouge Magnet High School, one of the top schools in Louisiana. She’s also served as the assistant principal at Woodlawn High, principal at McKinley High and the director of the state Department of Education’s Division of School and Community Support under former superintendent Cecil Picard.

These days, however, this veteran educator has forgone retirement to return to the classroom and teach at Prescott, one of the parish’s worst-performing schools.

It’s a daunting task, but she’s banking on her extensive teaching accomplishments to provide a model for success.

“If you provide the same experiences for these kids, they will succeed, too, just like any other students,” she says. “I truly believe that. There are lots of examples of high poverty, high-performing schools across the United States. There’s no reason why Prescott can’t be one of them.”

Two years ago, at the urging of her sister, who has taught at Prescott for 35 years, Warren interviewed to be a daily substitute teacher. At the time Prescott was short seven full-time teachers, and its reputation hampered efforts to attract new teachers, even substitutes. But the principal recognized Warren as a highly qualified certified teacher and hired her for a permanent position for the remainder of the school year.

“I told the principal after that first year here that I would not be back, but after the summer comes and goes and you remember those little faces, you come back and you do it all over again,” Warren says. “Teaching is the best profession in the world. It’s the only job where you can start over every year. In teaching you always have a chance to fix things and make them better.”

Warren says emphatically that she will return to Prescott next year. She joins more than three dozen faculty members nervously waiting to find out the fate of their beloved school community. With a state takeover looming the options are limited. Prescott will either accept a charter school application or be absorbed into the state recovery school district. The latter, however, would prove problematic, as a retired teacher she would not be allowed to teach at Prescott given its classification by the state. Warren is one of eight such teachers that would be affected by this rule, including one who’s a former colleague from Baton Rouge High.

For a school that once had problems retaining teachers, it now seems Prescott faculty are in it for the long haul, dedicated to the troubled school’s students. At a recent job fair, Warren says many people cried as teachers explored transfer options for the coming school year.

“We want to teach these kids,” she says. “At the fair I picked an at-risk, underserved school, Capitol Middle, as my first choice. So depending on what happens. I’ll be back at another Prescott next year.”