“You are the best teacher in the whole world!”

“Thank you for being so nice to me. I love coming to school because of you!”

“Thanks for helping me in math. You are the best in the world and I am glad that I met you.”

Although Shirley Huffman is only nine months into her teaching career, the compliments and expressions of gratitude posted on her official website illustrate how quickly she has endeared herself to her third-grade students at Lone Jack School Center near Pineville.

“I check those messages all the time,” Shirley says. “I just love it when they write to me.”

If Shirley’s students knew the remarkable story that led her into teaching, their appreciation of her would be even greater. The Workforce Investment Act (WIA) program played a key role in that story, serving as the bridge that led Shirley from a past that included two false starts at college to her present career in elementary education.

Shirley’s days are filled with constant activity. She might guide her 16 students through the rigors of division and advanced multiplication, then jump to calling upon the assistance of “Magic C”—a white rabbit puppet in a black top hat—to help explain the finer points of cursive handwriting. From there it’s on to lessons in reading, social studies, and science as Shirley takes her students across the full educational spectrum each day.

“I have a set schedule, but there is no such thing as a typical day,” she says. “Anything can happen.”

Shirley delivers her lessons with a comfortable, soft-spoken-but-confident demeanor that makes it easy to see why she believes she did not choose teaching, but rather that the profession chose her.

“I always wanted to teach, even when I was a little girl,” Shirley says. “I could never see myself doing anything else.”

Despite her deep conviction that she was meant to teach, Shirley says there were times on the prolonged path to her career when she felt as if she would never reach her destination.

She began that journey as a 21-year-old single mother seeking a better life for herself and her infant daughter. Twice she entered college, but both stints were each cut short after a year by Shirley’s desire to remain at home with “my babies,” which included twins after she remarried. After her second attempt at college ended, she managed to get a taste of the career she longed for, first as a substitute teacher and later as a full-time teacher’s aide.

“I loved being around kids, and I knew I had a heart for children,” she says.

After those jobs ended, Shirley found herself working for minimum-wage at a Middlesboro grocery store. She says that job provided the motivation she needed to get serious about resuming her college education, earning a degree, and becoming a teacher.

“At the time, my husband had lost his job, and we were living on my grocery-store income of about $12,000 a year,” Shirley says. “But when he started working again, I knew it was time I went back to college and finished up.”

After taking a few classes at Walters State Community College in Morristown, TN, Shirley—then 39 years old—transferred back to Lincoln Memorial University where she had completed the first half of her college education.

The escalating costs of being a full-time college student soon caught up with Shirley, but a chance encounter between her eldest daughter and Pam Wilson—a WIA career adviser with the Bell County JobSight workforce center—changed everything.

The Bell County JobSight is a part of the JobSight network, a collaborative partnership of workforce and training agencies administered by the Eastern Kentucky Concentrated Employment Program, Inc. (EKCEP), which also funds the WIA programs. The Bell County JobSight is operated by the Bell-Whitley Community Action Agency in Pineville.

“I met Shirley’s daughter Hannah when she was working at a restaurant in town,” Pam says. “We were chit-chatting, and she told me her mother was going to college and was in education. I told her about what we could offer her through WIA, and everything took off from there.

“It was just a case of being at the right place at the right time,” Pam says.

Pam told Shirley that WIA supportive services would cover her daily gas and food expenses associated with the remaining two years of her college program. WIA also helped cover Shirley’s tuition and textbooks fees, and later would reimburse a portion of the fees associated with her test to earn her teaching certification.

“I’m so proud of Shirley,” Pam says. “You don’t often see someone of her age making a 4.0 GPA and putting forth the effort that she did. I’m glad to see her succeed.”

With WIA’s assistance, Shirley completed her studies and earned her bachelor’s degree in education in May 2006. Less than two months later, she was handed the keys to her classroom at Lone Jack School Center.

“It’s never too late to go back to college, and WIA helped make it possible for me to finish up and earn my degree,” Shirley says. “It’s a wonderful program, and without it, I certainly would have struggled.”

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