By Stephen Smoot
Ask anyone at the Harrison County Schools office or the high school where she works, they will first tell you what an incredible cook Carol Sue Bennett is. Dora Stutler, Harrison County Superintendent of Schools, remarks that “she makes great dips.”
“Sue is one of the best cooks,” says Ronald Keener II, principal of South Harrison High School, “She feeds the students and she feeds the staff.”
The same ingredient that Bennett puts in her famous peanut butter balls, stuffed peppers, and her dips is the same thing that she has shared as a special education aide for 49 years – love of her students, colleagues, and her job.
Bennett, in her 80th year, applied for a position with the school system in the last year of Richard Nixon’s presidency. She had worked for Billy Allman, a local television repairman, then “I put in an application at Lost Creek Elementary School. I talked to Mr. Coffindaffer.” A week after she started work, the school system officially hired her.
She started out in the elementary school and worked 16 years, then moved to the middle school. The last 26 years, Bennett has worked at South Harrison. She also won service personnel of the year for Harrison County for 2023.
Governor Jim Justice has marked September 22 as a fitting time to honor student service personnel with an official day. In his proclamation released this year, Justice stated that “these dedicated individuals serve the children of West Virginia in our public education system and have an important role.”
Stutler, a former principal, agrees that service personnel like Bennett are “the glue that keeps it all running.” She described them as “the first line. Students interact with them first and tell them things we need to know.”
Her lengthy tenure of service gives her unique insight into the students and their families. Bennett has served as an archivist of school materials over the decades while also seeing and knowing family members as students for generations. Keener described how “she had a student who lost his father recently. She found pictures of his father back when he was in high school.” Sharing those pictures with him helped.
As an aide, Bennett does much to help students with special needs. She escorts students between classes, assists teachers within class, and do whatever it takes to help students to succeed. Bennett also greets visitors, helps in the office, and serves on bus duty.
Never one to rest on her education and experience, Bennett has taken 40 continuing education hours over the past three years, including first aid recertification, discipline and de-escalation training, and more, indicating she has no plans to retire anytime soon. “I’d rather be on the move than sitting there!” she exclaimed.
Keener emphasized that Bennett always “goes above and beyond.” She described how she instructed the children to scrape leftover food off of their trays into the garbage instead of “banging them on the side.” The next day, those students who followed her instructions received a peanut butter ball. Bennett gave this as an example of “meeting them halfway without overstepping boundaries.”
Another time, Bennett found herself with a group of “special ed kids who didn’t want to get up.” She described how “I did handstands and cartwheels, then said ‘If Miss Sue can do that, you can too!’” Bennett succeeded in getting them moving and called that one of the highlights of her long career.”
One of the great gifts that Bennett shares comes from her values, which some might consider as more at home with an older generation. She said that when Mr. Keener first came to the school as principal, that students often wore both ball caps and “hoodies.”
Both Keener and Bennett saw such behavior as disrespectful to the school, the staff, and the students themselves and worked to end the practice. “Since Mr. Keener’s been here,” she shared approvingly, “there has been a lot more respect.”
Bennett added “if you don’t have respect, you don’t have much. Once you have that in place, you get more learning. Maybe they don’t get it at home, but they have that here.” She also said “the majority are good.”
Her father’s passion for gardening helped to germinate in Bennett a love of farming, which led her to work with the agriculture instructors at South Harrison. She praised how the program, which she and Keener both acknowledged is “one of the best in the state,” not only taught how to grow food with modern techniques while also instructing the business side of agriculture.
But true to her reputation of always going beyond, she also dove into the hands-on aspects of other classes. “I learned how to run cutting torches. I welded. We made seats, picnic tables for the park.” She also helped with woodworking.
Much has changed with education and family dynamics since she started her service with the school system. The old “nuclear family” with a single breadwinner has long since become a rarity. “I just think parents are so busy working. It takes two and they don’t work with kids as much.”
Bennett also commented on the rising number of grandparents and other family members besides parents raising children. She said that “the kids are so up on everything that grandma and grandpa don’t know about.”
Children raised in dysfunctional environments have also exploded over the decades, She shared that on home visits, “some of the situations you see are so bad, you know where they are coming from,” then added “even for new teachers, if they realize where kids are coming from, it makes it easier to teach.”
Bennett’s impact over generations has reached an entire community. She described how at the recent festival in Lost Creek, former students would excitedly come up and greet her. “I enjoy seeing them,” she said, “they still come up and hug me.”