From classmates to coworkers: six former Glen Allen Elementary students have made their way back ‘home’

When second-grade teacher Kristen Bateman walks the halls of Glen Allen Elementary every day, she sees that some things have changed since she was an elementary student herself – a bigger building, new additions – but a lot has stayed the same after all of those years.

“You still have the sense of childhood from my nostalgia of being here,” Bateman said. “You remember certain parts of it, like parts of the library, the fish tank. Seeing some of the same artwork, just the friendliness of this area still exists for me.”

For five other Glen Allen staffers, this nostalgia rings true as well. Along with Bateman, second-grade teacher Maya Apel, fifth-grade teacher Molly Hughes, exceptional education teacher Rachel Parks, instructional assistant Bobbie-Jean Shannon, and associate principal Jordan Truda all returned to work at their old elementary school.

Many of this cohort of six – who are now all coworkers – went to Glen Allen together. Apel, Hughes, Parks, and Shannon all went through Glen Allen Elementary, Hungary Creek Middle, and then Glen Allen High at about the same time and have now returned to their elementary school as educators.

Apel and Hughes, who are first-year teachers, remember the relief of seeing a familiar face during their first day on the job. The two used to play field hockey together in high school and had no idea they would end up working at one of the same schools they attended together.

“When I found out [Hughes] got hired here too, because it’s both of our first years, I was like, ‘Oh thank goodness! I’ve got someone else who’s new and coming in,’” Apel said.

“I’m glad we have each other,” Hughes said.

The two new teachers make sure to visit each other at the end of the day and debrief, often laying on the floor of Apel’s classroom – which was once the classroom she sat in as a first-grader years ago.

Apel also sees another familiar face almost every day; she teaches second grade with Bateman, whose kids she once babysat. They both even share students and teach classes together.

“It made me feel a lot more comfortable coming into my second-grade team knowing that I already knew someone really well,” Apel said. “And knowing how awesome she is and knowing her kids too. It just makes it more like a community.”

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Shannon, who works with hard of hearing students in exceptional ed, also joined alongside Hughes, who was her former classmate all throughout elementary, middle and high school.

“We had a lot of the same classes all the way up,” Hughes said. “It’s weird at first. [Shannon] was like, ‘Wait, this is weird seeing you as a teacher!’”

For Bateman and Truda, who are veteran educators, this isn’t their first time returning to Glen Allen Elementary. Their own children also attended the school. Bateman’s son even had the same third-grade teacher that she had.

“It’s literally like full generation,” Bateman said. “It’s a big sense of community here. There are people that I went to Glen Allen Elementary with and right now their kids are also here. I feel like a lot of people just come back to this area.”

Many of the same teachers they had also are still working at Glen Allen. Truda, who attended Glen Allen from 1995 to 2000, said that two teachers who were there when he was a student frequently come back to substitute at the school. Bateman, who attended Glen Allen from 1988 to 1993, said that her former teacher, Sarah Thayer, still works alongside her.

“I still never call Ms. Thayer by ‘Sarah,’” Bateman said. “When I wrote her thank-you notes, it was always ‘To Ms. Thayer.’ I could never write Sarah. It just feels weird.”

Parks, who attended Glen Allen from 2003 to 2009, remembers other staff from when she was a student that still work at the school, too: P.E. teacher Karen Lucas, librarian Theresa Harris, art teacher Karen Siler, and library assistant Julie Lehman, who used to work in the front office. And Shannon, who along with Hughes attended Glen Allen from 2006 to 2012, remembers her first-grade teacher Jessica Stoner, who is now her coworker.

“Ms. Stoner was my first grade teacher, so it’s a weird feeling to be working with your teacher,” Shannon said. “She doesn’t like it when I call her Ms. Stoner. She tries to get me to call her by her first name, but that’s just weird.”

Apel also had Stoner as her teacher when she attended Glen Allen from 2005 to 2011 and said  that it's because of Stoner that she chose to become a teacher herself. Apel now teaches in Stoner’s old first-grade classroom, in the exact place she was first inspired to teach.

And Apel is not only coworkers with her former first-grade teacher but also with her mom, who began to work at Glen Allen when Apel was in second grade.

“I’ve never wanted to do anything else. Since I had my first-grade teacher Ms. Stoner, I’ve always wanted to teach,” Apel said. “My mom also started working here, so I was just always coming back here. In middle school, I was coming to help out. I was just always around the school, so it just always felt perfect that I could make it back here.”

Parks and Hughes both said that their time at Glen Allen Elementary also encouraged them to pursue teaching.

“It’s always been my dream to come back here,” Parks said. “Ever since I can remember, I just wanted to be a teacher.”

“I have the best memories here, so it was really special to come back here,” Hughes said. “I walk the hallways and I’m like, ‘Oh, I remember this from when I was a kid.’ It’s just so funny.”

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The school feels a lot smaller to Truda now as an adult, even though the building itself has expanded. As the associate principal, he walks around the hallways and classrooms seeing some of the same artwork he remembers as a student, seeing his former classmates come back as parents and his former teachers come back as substitutes.

“It’s very neat to walk to halls of somewhere that feels so familiar but definitely felt much larger when we were kids. You walk into a classroom and you try and go, ‘Did I have a teacher in this class?’” Truda said. “There are some parts that are the same. In the library, there are murals that have been up there since before I was there, and that’s always been a memory of mine.”

Truda can pinpoint the moment he suddenly wanted to become an educator; it was his senior year of high school at Hermitage High, when he took a psychology class from his now-favorite teacher, Tim Donahue.

“Coming out of high school, I thought I wanted to be an engineer,” Truda said. “And then I had an amazing teacher my senior year, the psychology teacher over at Hermitage High School, and I wanted to be like him. He was engaging, he was fun, he was just kind of wild, but it made me want to be there every day and learn from him.”

Former Glen Allen principal Robert Siegel was a big part of Bateman’s memories of elementary school. She remembers when Siegel started the school’s Veterans’ Day tradition, an annual assembly that students attend with their families and with military veterans from the area. Bateman brought her grandfather and cheered as veterans waved from a parade of convertibles. She remembers Siegel coming back when her son was in school to teach the chess club.

Seeing familiar faces like Siegel and so many other ‘returners’ like herself reminds Bateman of how tight-knit the school feels. The building is full of neighbors, old classmates and teachers, and some staff members stay at the school for decades.

“I feel like it kind of builds on that whole idea of who they hire here,” Bateman said. “It speaks out to people who really want to invest in the community. It’s not just like a job that you show up and work a seven-to-three situation.”

Apel also remembers some of the same things as Bateman – getting to go up the stairs to the ‘cool area’ as a fifth-grader, playing frisbee golf during Field Day, performing at the annual winter performance. She now gets to watch her second-grade students make those same memories.

When she tells her students that she used to be a first-grader in their classroom, they can hardly believe it.

“The kids find it so cool. I told them, ‘This was my class,’ and they were like, ‘What! You were once a student?’” Apel said.

Glen Allen’s principal Melissa Halquist Pruden even remembers Hughes and Shannon as rising fifth-graders, and Apel as graduating to middle school, when she first became the school’s principal. Watching them grow up and then return to work with her as teachers, she said, makes an endearing full-circle moment.

With six staff members being former students this year, and a number of other longtime teachers and parents returning with their own children, Apel and her fellow ‘returners’ say that Glen Allen feels much like its own small town within a school.

“One of the first things that Melissa [Halquist Pruden] says is, ‘Welcome home again,’” Apel said. “I’m glad I made it back. Once a Cub, always a Cub.”

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Liana Hardy is the Citizen’s Report for America Corps member and education reporter. Her position is dependent upon reader support; make a tax-deductible contribution to the Citizen through RFA here.