Coming tomorrow: The AJC travels to Irwin and Tift Counties, where Republican candidate Richard Woods has worked and worshipped for years, to find out how his beliefs and experiences there may shape his views on how Georgia should educate its children.
If Valarie Wilson becomes Georgia’s next superintendent of schools, she’ll take a lot of this little town with her.
She mentions Swainsboro in campaign speeches, points to it as a way of reminding audiences that, while her current home is in Decatur, she’s got small-town Georgia in her blood. She was raised by educators, she says, and she won’t forget their needs and their sacrifices if elected Nov. 4.
In part because of those educators, Wilson says she’ll push for changes that make things easier for teachers, which, she argues, will improve academic outcomes for students.
Wilson grew up in a small house on Oliphant Street, the youngest of a trio of children born to Bessie Doyle, a teacher, and Jesse Doyle, a brickmason. Pictures of Wilson, her parents and siblings still line the walls. Her mother, soft-spoken and white-haired, still lives there, tending her garden when not being visited by friends and former students.
In a town where a family counted itself as lucky if it had a man who worked in turpentine or wood processing, the Doyles were especially fortunate. Two parents — two jobs — meant the ravenous poverty that chewed its way into so many area homes was largely kept at bay.
Bessie Doyle’s best friend, Etheldra Miller, thought young Val, confident and talkative, would go on to become a teacher. There would, after all, be a certain logic in that.
For more years than either can precisely remember now, Etheldra Miller and Bessie Doyle taught elementary school in classrooms that faced one another.
The women shared a passion for their work. And that work helped forge a bond that sealed their families. Their husbands got along well, and their three children – two girls and boy for Doyle; two boys and a girl for Miller – got on, too.
Their husbands have died, but the women and their children remain close.
Even now, the 56-year old Wilson calls Miller ‘Mom-mill,’ a nickname that speaks to her status as a second mother.
It was Miller who would intercede when Wilson’s parents came down on her for giving her own toys or food to less fortunate classmates.
“Valarie is a very compassionate person,” Miller said. “It bothers her to see children that are really needy. If she saw children that were really needy, she would give them what she had. She always wanted to do more for them.”
Doyle herself approached her job with that mindset.
In an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Doyle recalled a recent encounter with a man she taught many years ago.
“He said, ‘Mrs. Doyle, you did something for me years ago that I bet you don’t remember,’ ” Doyle recalled. “I said, ‘What was that?’ He said, ‘I came to school so hungry one day, and you gave me something to eat.’ I do remember now. I gave him some gingerbread and water. Had him eat it in the cafeteria away from the other children. Children can be cruel. They don’t mean to be, but they can be.”
The man grew up to be a minister and lives in Missouri, Doyle said.
While young Val had the smarts and the temperament to teach, she also had the memory of seeing her mother chained to a table into the night grading papers.
Doyle said she loved her work, loved the children she taught, but she didn’t want Valarie or her siblings following in her footsteps.
Too much paperwork. Too much bureaucracy. And nothing at all to stop you from giving more than you had to give.
“I didn’t encourage them,” Doyle said. “I would say, ‘Get you a job where, at 4:30, you can lock that office door and leave that work.’ You see, a teacher’s job is never done.”
Wilson said she hoped to be a broadcast journalist, not a teacher. But such a career meant a more expensive education, she figured, and her parents were already stretched to help her pay for studies at Clark College.
She has held a series of high-level administrative jobs — director of the Human Services Department for Fulton County, director of Fulton’s Office of Aging and, currently, executive director of the Atlanta BeltLine Partnership.
Neither Doyle nor Miller were shocked when, in 2001, Wilson ran for and won a seat on the City Schools of Decatur school board. She eventually served as chairwoman of the board from 2005-2011.
Now, she wants to take that work experience — and the experiences of her upbringing in Swainsboro — with her into the superintendent’s job.
Her campaign’s central pledge has been that Georgia needs to provide school districts with all of the money they’re supposed to get under the state’s complicated funding formula. That, she argues, would end teacher furloughs and open the door to raises for them.
“They need to take care of their families,” Wilson said. “Having a quality of life that allows for them to not think about getting another job, that in and of itself would contribute to more success with students in the classroom.”
Wilson also said more parental involvement will improve education in Georgia. She said she knows that first-hand from the women who helped shape her life in Swainsboro.
“It takes a village,” she said. “I had a village around me when I was growing up. It takes us all.”
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