It was one of those muggy, hot evenings last month—the kind of evening so common this summer, with a thundershower often interrupting but not bringing any relief to the sticky heat. We were gathered at my nephew’s air conditioned, comfortable home in Roanoke, I with my handy little voice recorder and three high school teachers including my nephew—all teachers at William Byrd High School in Vinton, Virginia. Two other teachers had been invited and were disappointed they couldn’t attend because of scheduling conflicts. 

The three who had agreed to come, Catie, Shelly, and Marc, attended because they are confessing believers in Jesus Christ and they wanted to share their experiences and reasons for serving Christ in the public school system. That there had been five willing teachers mostly from the same department and all from the same school amazed me. These three assured me there were other believers in other departments as well. Then they shared a story about a Christian principal also in their school, who came an hour before school started every day so he could walk the empty halls and pray for the coming school day. I was not aware of the workings of our God in any public school system. Not that I think He can’t. I simply didn’t know. I bring you their story for the sake of praising God for what He is doing and for encouraging God’s people, especially all Christian teachers in public schools.

William Byrd is part of the Roanoke County Public Schools which circle around the city of Roanoke, Virginia. It includes five school systems with a Superintendent and his staff hired by a School Board overseeing them all. The town of Vinton, where Byrd is located, bumps right into the Roanoke City border. The students are comprised not only of Vinton’s residents but also the farming community just outside of town, as well as the many new home developments that have been popping up in the area for the past couple of decades. The owners of these homes are often professionals. So, Byrd’s students come from diverse economic and racial backgrounds and recently have included a surge of immigrants and refugees. 

In fact, Catie teaches English as a second language. She says her passion is international kids, and she’s wondering which of her students will be back again this year. Because she has given her number out a bit to help students with translation problems over the summer, and therefore has contact with some, she is aware of the fear of many of their families right now.

Catie has been a believer since her early teens and felt called to the mission field, spending time teaching English in China years ago, after college graduation. Later, after marrying and becoming a mother, she stopped teaching for pay to homeschool her own three children until each had completed high school. That was seven years ago, and she has been teaching at Byrd since. 

Catie attends classes with her students so she can help them with translation. Last year she had 14 freshmen as well as upper grade students. (Our discussion centered mostly on Freshmen because Marc and Shelly teach ninth grade English.) 

Shelly is a special education teacher and works with students who are assigned to Marc’s English classes. They have been teamed together this way for six years, but Shelly has been teaching for 18 years. Shelly sees teaching as “a calling, a ministry, a mission. I build relationships with the kids,” she says. “We are all called to be Christlike. It’s cool to have kids come by the year after I’ve had them and as they pass me in the hallway, they nudge each other and say ‘she loves Jesus.’”

“My goal every day is to do what God wants me to do,” Shelly continues. “To be open to the opportunities that God presents. It might be a one-on-one conversation with a kid that’s in crisis mode. I want to give the kids an opportunity to function every single day. Teaching becomes a part of those relationships.”

Marc has been teaching for 20 years at Byrd. It was never his intention to teach as a vocation. After college he got involved in music and theater and enjoyed reading and writing. He made the decision to teach after he married. “I knew I wanted a family career and a family schedule. It didn’t really become ministry to me until after I was in it. I found I needed to be a role model for some of these kids.”

“In my head [back then] I was dealing with children,” Marc says. “Our department head once told us, ‘Now be careful. These are the people that will be changing your diapers in the nursing home.’”

Marc says he has now thought that through. “What they see in school will be incorporated into their adulthood. What they see in me will influence their adulthood…That changed my perspective in the classroom a lot. Trying to be a Christian in front of them. A lot of these kids don’t have a man in their lives on a regular basis. Maybe there one day—gone the next. They see [in me] a guy who is there every day and invested in them, someone genuine. In some very small way this is a model of Christ. For me the big one is relationship building.”

Another way Marc feels he is instilling some Christian principles is by the curriculum he uses. He tries to be very purposeful in that. He wants to have the students read literature that addresses morals, what is right and wrong. This then turns into classroom discussions—at a “casual” level. A lot of these kinds of ideas may never be discussed in the students’ personal and family experiences, but the literature and classroom discussions become a way to influence their views of morality.

I was very impressed at how seriously these teachers wanted to build strong relationships with their students. They are not afraid to tell them that they care for them, even love them, distinguishing between kinds of love. Marc likes to use Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to illustrate these concepts. 

I could also see that these teachers are making a difference in their students’ lives through their relationships, particularly in how Catie described the things she knows about her students. Things they share with her because they trust her. “My kids come to me usually in survival mode,” she says. “They’ve crawled over the border or swam the Rio Grande. Walked from Venezuela. They come to me in all kinds of emotional states. All kinds of states of education. Some of them have never been to school. Some have dropped out at the age of 13 because that’s what they do in the country they have come from and then they’re forced to come to school here. My goal is to teach them how to survive here and make relationships. Because I am advocating for them on multiple levels, it is easy for us to attach to one another. I have the best job in the county schools,” Catie readily admits. “Jesus says, ‘Whatever you do for the least of these—you do it for me.’ Last year I had a girl who had been sold by her grandmother into sexual slavery. Then she got followed by a gang of girls and got hit in the back of the head. She lost recognizance skills and I don’t know if she will recover them.”

Shelly joins in here. “It’s not just legal and illegal immigrants with these stories. There’s American kids, too. They are not immune or protected enough from gang assaults or sexual attacks.”

While we hear a lot about evil ideologies creeping into our school systems, it was refreshing to hear these teachers say they hadn’t had to deal much with those issues, and were satisfied with the stand taken by their administration. They find their supervisors easy to work with in these regards, and because of all this they feel tremendously “blessed.”

However, they do see the system’s failures in educating well. There are a surprising number of children entering 9th grade who cannot read. They have been passed through the system, seemingly uneducated. By the time they reach high school there is not individual help to be had. Of course, this is even more true of Catie’s students who never have been taught to speak, let alone read English. 

Because of the types of jobs that Catie and Shelly have, they feel the system puts too much emphasis on paperwork. Both teachers say they can feel overwhelmed and distracted from their teaching by the pressure of paperwork and deadlines. It’s a vicious cycle—the paperwork so the schools can be entitled to grant and government funds, but at the same time the loss of necessary teaching time for the students. They feel that having the right numbers and answering questions according to what the school wants are so important to the school’s administration that they sometimes feel they are being asked to mislead about the actual status of their students. 

I asked what these teachers thought about homeschooling. They were all for it. Catie, as I mentioned before, homeschooled her children. Marc said that often the homeschooled students that have entered his high school classes have been “some of the easiest kids I’ve gotten to work with.”

However, as Shelley pointed out, some of us have no choice but to send our children to public schools. “My job as a parent is to teach my child to be a Christian in the world.” We cannot shelter our children from the world entirely, nor should we. All three teachers agreed that we need to make our children community minded. Someday our children will be the adult working community. 

Marc says that even in the classroom he teaches the idea of working together—the idea of community. He tells them, “You are not 20 individuals, you are a part of something. We can accomplish together.” He wants to help them nurture relationships with one another. In the same way he urges Christian parents to teach their children to be involved in community even if homeschooling. Take advantage of sports and fine arts that the community offers. Often these are offered to homeschooling families by public schools and parents should use them if possible. No matter which route parents take, they need to be involved in the school community as much as possible. The Christian influence coming from Christian parents is essential to the community as a whole. Marc summed it up this way: “Raise your kids in the church. Use public schools for your purposes.”

By the time you read this, Catie, Shelly, and Marc will have started the next school year. I asked them how we could pray for them as they went back to face a new group of students. 

Catie said to pray that she would “not grow weary in doing good.” 

Shelly said she “wants to be aware of the opportunities.”

Marc pointed out that he tends to operate in his own strength and when he becomes overwhelmed, to run himself all the harder. Pray that he would “rely solely on God in the classroom.”

Pray, also, for all public school teachers, particularly those that are serving Christ in them, thanking God that He has placed them there. Be encouraged. Not only has He placed them there, He is using them for His glory.