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Jacalyn Warner
Teacher of the Month
By Jenn Director Knudsen
Jacalyn Warner entered college expecting to take classes of interest and exit with a hubby, not a career. She did take courses she enjoyed – at Houston Baptist University, where in 1978 she earned a Bachelor's in education and a minor in history – and left school on a career path. She just didn't realize it at first.
Warner became a first-grade teacher, but neither when she thought she would, nor how.
Hailing from the "small, rural town community" of Eagle Lake, Texas, about 40 miles outside Houston, Warner says young women in the 1970s didn't go to college with career aspirations. "Things have changed a lot since then," says Warner, 49, from her home in Katy, Texas. "I have a lot of friends who didn't go to college."
After graduating from the university, Warner married and had two children, Camille and Caroline, now 25 and 22, respectively. "I did the mommy thing," she says of her life immediately following college. "I was very fortunate and able to stay home with my children until my youngest daughter started first grade."
But she never forgot her seminal experiences in junior high and high school – she spent summers from eighth grade through high school graduation teaching elementary school students at local Vacation Bible Schools. "I saw that I enjoyed working with children," she says. "I just knew I had a gift for teaching, organizing – planning different activities. I knew in high school I had that."
And for the past 16 years Warner has been a first grade teacher at Diane Winborn Elementary School in the Katy Independent School District, where her gifts are recognized and appreciated by both administrators and parents alike.
