Friday, May 25, 2007

Lynne Kornegay retires after 49 years in classroom

By Daphne Brown of DeSoto TODAY

Say Lynne Kornegay's name and people's eyes light up with affectionate recognition.

They'll have a story about her teaching them or their children.

An elementary school teacher for most of her 50-year career in education, Kornegay intends to retire in May with 49 years in the DeSoto School District.

DeSoto TODAY

The story you are reading was originally published in DeSoto TODAY.

Be sure to check out the TODAY Newspapers Online for more in-depth community news coverage.

“People have a real problem with realizing how little we were,” Kornegay said from her classroom at Amber Terrace Intermediate School where she continues to enjoy teaching sixth grade. “The building on Belt Line Road, where the administrative offices are, was the campus.”

She recalls starting her teaching career here during the 1956-57 school year when there were 14 teachers in the whole system. She said people like Roy and Janice Orr and Bobby Waddle graduated from Lancaster High School because DeSoto did not have a senior high at that time.

The year she started teaching was the same year the district's first ninth grade class began, she said.

“I like to tell people that the high school and I started at the same time,” she said. “The high school was where the curriculum building is now. It's had a number of facelifts and I haven't.”

Kornegay said she was most proud to have taught with Ruby Young, after whom the district named one of its five elementary campuses. She witnessed the shock and admiration Young expressed when the campus was named in her honor.

A student at Texas Woman's University in Denton, Kornegay had been pursuing a degree in occupational therapy and music. Her plan had not been to teach until an afternoon of secretarial work in the district turned into a life-changing decision.

“Ruby Young had perfect attendance and never missed a day of work due to illness on her part in all of the years she worked here, but her mother-in-law got sick and she had to leave campus,” she said. “The principal told me I had just become a sixth-grade teacher and I went back to school and changed my major.”

Having turned age 72 earlier this year, Kornegay said she would “just as soon not teach 28 students at one time.” Instead, she is more interested in teaching one-on-one with at-risk readers. The smaller groups of special populations are fun to work with. She intends to concentrate on students experiencing trouble with the writing portion of the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills state test.

She also wants to help teachers just starting out in the profession. She has plenty of advice for them.

“You know what I came to realize,” she said. “If you're going to teach children, you better have a sense of humor.”

She said teachers have to love children, too, in order to be effective in their lives.

“Nobody has paid attention to my retiring because I've done it before,” Kornegay joked. “I retired two years ago and came back so Amber Terrace has had to redo the plaque it has in the front walkway of the school with my picture.”

Named the district's Teacher of the Year during the 1993-94 school year, Kornegay said story after story comes spilling out of her if she gets to seeing too many former students or their parents.

Kornegay also had two children and three stepchildren who graduate from DHS.

“You almost can't find someone in this town I haven't taught,” she said. “I taught Roy Orr's four children and Charles Henderson's (a principal in the DeSoto School District) children.”

Originally from Lufkin, Kornegay and her husband moved to Plano so he could start his own business. The family returned to DeSoto not long after the move, where Kornegay picked up her teaching right where she left off.

“It's not the current way to stay in one place so long,” she said. “We are definitely a dying breed, but I found exactly what I wanted to do and I stuck with it.”

Kornegay attends First United Methodist Church and she says working with children is “the most fun of anything I do.”

Pegasus News content partner - Cedar Hill TODAY

See more stories in:

• DeSoto ISD > DeSoto ISD Elementary Schools

Comments