Untitled Document
Ask Sheila Walk what she misses about her previous
teaching job, and she ticks off a list ranging from the profound to the
mundane: She misses the quaint architecture of the ancient building. She
misses the students and teachers who filled its halls. She misses the
“block scheduling” that allotted 90 minutes per class. She even
misses the blue recycling bins. The fact that her new job pays a significantly higher
wage and has air conditioning — a perk her previous gig lacked
— doesn’t begin to compensate for what she lost.
“I miss being completely sure of what I’m
doing and that I’m doing it well,” she says softly. “I
miss the familiarity of it.”
For 22 years Walk taught language arts at Ursuline
Academy. In May, when the school’s owners — Springfield College
in Illinois and Benedictine University — announced that the school
would be closed down, Walk was the teacher who had been there longest. She
knew every student, every family. She loved that school. “There was a feel to it that visitors would
often comment upon,” Walk says. “My husband, soon in our
courtship, said, ‘This doesn’t feel like a normal high
school.’ There was something unique about it. It was hard to define,
but once people got there they understood it.”
Her voice makes her sound like a cross between a
Midwestern farm girl, which she is (her family raised grain and livestock
on a spread outside of Neoga), and the sweet ingénue in some BBC
Masterpiece Theatre production. She chooses her words consciously, from a
classical vocabulary, and her tone approximates that of a professional golf
commentator. At Ursuline, Walk taught speech, discussion, debate, oral
interpretation, and drama — a job she calls “an enviable
load.”
“There are few schools in Illinois where that
much speech communication is taught,” she says. Her load included required classes for freshmen and
sophomores, so she taught every student in Ursuline Academy for at least a
year and a half. At school sporting events, concerts, or performances, Walk
knew every kid on the field, court, or stage — an intimacy that never
failed to sweeten the experience.
“You know the old adage ‘You don’t
know what you’ve got till it’s gone’? Well, I knew what I
had,” Walk says. “It was a wonderful place.”
She heard rumblings that the school was in trouble,
with its budget declining, but as Ursuline approached its jubilee year Walk
felt optimistic. “Our enrollment was up, the principal was
staying, most teachers were staying, and we had a great group of parents
and students. So I thought, ‘This is great; this is a new chapter, an
upward swing,’ ” she says.
“When rumors would circulate, I would say,
‘You know, this school’s been here 150 years. We’ve been
through wars and depressions. This is a scrappy little school. We’re
fine.’ ”
But on May 14 the principal made a startling
announcement. He sent the students to the gym and gathered the teachers and
staff in a classroom to tell them that Ursuline was being closed. “Time stopped for a moment, because it was such
a shock,” Walk says. “In that moment, life changed for me. It
wasn’t a career or a profession, and it certainly wasn’t just a
job. It was my vocation — and I used that in the lay sense of the
word, not the religious term. It’s what I’d given my life
to.”
What followed was a blur: two weeks of academic
intensity, preparing students for final exams as though everything was
normal, even as she watched them cycle through the stages of grief.
Graduation, more poignant than usual. The jubilee celebration of
Ursuline’s 150th year. The task of emptying the classroom she had
inhabited for more than 20 years. Students, alums, family, and friends helped Walk pack
and load box after box on a truck. “I will always remember that last look around
the classroom, now empty, and sound of the door as it closed,” she
says. Walk, though, had something not every Ursuline teacher
had — a clear knowledge of where she was going. Only two days after
SCI announced the school closure, Walk had received a phone call from Chuck
Hoots, the principal of Springfield High School. She later received other
inquiries but decided to accept Hoots’ offer. Walk now teaches senior
English, a speech class, and a course called Drama as Literature in a
fourth-floor classroom (take the elevator to the third floor, then climb a
steep staircase) at Springfield High.
“I feel like a new teacher again,” she
says. “After 27 years of teaching, I feel like a rookie.”
She likes SHS. She likes the staff, the curriculum,
the architecture, the constant presence of her favorite creatures:
teenagers. She’s on board with the school’s mission statement;
she finds SHS policies “logical.” And she likes bumping into
the 40-or-so Ursuline refugees in the hallways. The only thing missing is
something she plans to rebuild. “I miss the trust. [At Ursuline], people trusted
me to know what I was doing and do a good job,” she says. “I
look forward to the students at Springfield High knowing that I have
information they’ll need about the world and college and beyond. I
have some accumulated wisdom, and they have a right to what I know.”
Contact Dusty Rhodes at drhodes@illinoistimes.com.
This article appears in Aug 30 – Sep 5, 2007.
