Raynell Young

Raynell Young arrived at the newly-desegregated Meridian school district in 1969 as an eighth grader from Banneker School. That same year, she fell in love with the man who would one day become her husband. “He was the best thing to happen to me,” she beams, the memories of a Junior-year wedding still fresh all these years later. Raynell graduated one year later than her husband in 1973, and her passion for education and the school environment in general followed. “I loved school,” she says. “I was one of those kids that would wander the halls when I got the chance.”

She soon wandered the halls of one of the most prolific educational experiments ever conducted in the United States. In 1973, she started work as a teacher’s aide in the federal government’s Follow-Through Program, the primary purpose of which was to collect data and determine the most efficient ways to instruct at-risk children from kindergarten through third grade. Districts that participated were given stipends in addition to comprehensive health services, nutrition, and medical and dental care. The program’s intended outcome was to identify which instructional models worked best with at-risk students, the “direct instructional” model winning out by demonstrating the greatest socioeducational benefit. The direct instructional model is all about clearing up misinterpretations. During her teaching career, Raynell has made her interactions with junior high kids all about identifying and cleaning out misinterpretations they may have about themselves.

“Junior High is when you can really reach them,” Raynell explains. “If you can reach a junior high student with the thought that what we’re doing is important for them, then yeah, they go to high school with that.” The recipe is simple: love, care, make a big difference in their lives. While they may pretend not to care as much in high school, Raynell has seen this countless times through direct experience. She wants to reach students, and she sees each child in her classrooms as a unique and special person, rich with opportunity and possibilities to make their world into a better place. During our conversation, she shared with me that she sees her teaching career as a kind of ministry, something that transcends a mere career, something that she feels, deep down, as her life’s purpose.

Raynell’s empathetic radar for students who require the most engagement was instilled in her by her mentor, Title I teacher Linda Tewis, whom she worked alongside as a teacher’s aide early in her career. “I would go to her classroom as an aide and see her work until the last minute was up. She always planned, always prepared,” Raynell remembers. “We talked about students that came in a year or two years behind or more and then watched them go to high school and they were on a roll.” After seeing Linda in action, Raynell decided that this was the kind of teacher she wanted to be.

Despite the challenges of raising four children of her own and attending school, she returned to undergraduate study at SEMO. She worked on her graduate degree in St. Louis until she was hired at Egyptian Junior High. She stayed for 26 years, but has yet to give up on her ‘ministry’ after retirement. You can still catch her wandering the halls of Meridian as a full-time substitute for kindergarten and fourth grade, and teaching K-8 at the preparatory academy attached to her church, the St. John Praise & Worship Center. The unrelenting commitment to the students in her hometown makes sense; she emphasizes again that they are her ministry. “When I wake up in the morning and when I lay my head down at night, I think about these children,” Raynell grins, “I want them to know that I see them when they go past.”

She’s nothing if not humble about her service, commenting that “when it’s all said and done, if they don’t remember, it’s okay.” We admire the humility, but we also have to say, for a story that begins in a lifelong romantic love discovered decades ago, we have no doubt that it continues and will ultimately conclude in the same spirit of total and unconditional love; for the students, for teaching, for Raynell’s very purpose in life that has seemingly always thrived in the hearts and halls of our area schools.