Mike Wolanin | The Republic Sue Breeding, left, helps Hadley McQueary get setup to give a presentation in her class at ABC Stewart School in Columbus, Ind., Wednesday, Jan. 5, 2022.
Three teachers have been named 2021 winners of the Reams Family Award for Excellence in Teaching.
This year’s recipients are fifth-grade teacher Libby Cravens from White Creek Lutheran School, first grade and computer teacher Sue Breeding from ABC-Stewart School, and high school dual credit English and speech teacher Cheryl Thill from Columbus Christian School.
The Reams Family Award was established at the Heritage Fund – The Community Foundation of Bartholomew County in 2007 by former Bartholomew County residents Fred and Karen Reams.
“The annual awards recognize outstanding educators teaching in the private schools serving Bartholomew County and come with a cash stipend,” the community foundation said. “Recipients are nominated by their principals with additional recommendations encouraged from fellow teachers, parents, and students.”
Libby Cravens
In Craven’s case, a passion for teaching was something that was clear even at young age.
“I have known my entire life, since I was little,” she said. “I would play school and stuff like that. Just always been a dream, I guess you could say.”
She started at White Creek Lutheran in 2019 and is in her third year. Before that, she worked at Faith Lutheran Preschool and was also a substitute teacher in the Bartholomew Consolidated School Corp.
Cravens, an alumni of White Creek and lifelong member of the church, called it a “second home.”
Her fifth and sixth grade teacher went on to become the principal at the school. When a position opened at White Creek, the two of them got in touch with each other and everything “fell into place,” said Cravens.
She said that her favorite part of work is building relationships with kids or with the other staff, who are like family to her.
According to the Heritage Fund, Cravens was nominated for “holding her students to the highest level of performance and building relationships with them and their families.”
“She encourages choice and responsibility in school work, and her students are school leaders in attitude and helpfulness,” the community foundation said.
Cravens recalls being shocked by the award announcement, which was a “confidence boost” and made her feel “very, very loved.”
“It’s very humbling to me,” she said.
Sue Breeding
Breeding was pleasantly surprised to find out she’d won the Reams award, saying, “It was the best award I think I’ve ever received in my life.”
She teaches computer classes and first grade at ABC-Stewart and also does IT work at the school.
Her experiences have included working as a teachers’ assistant in BCSC, working with Foundation For Youth’s Boys and Girls Club, teaching Pre-K at Southside and Fodrea and teaching at ABC-Stewart from 1997 to 2003 before leaving and later returning in 2014.
When Breeding chose to work in PreK, it was because she needed to be home more as her kids got older. When it was time to return to working full-time, she came to ABC-Stewart.
“I thought it was going to be part-time,” she recalled. “My first week I was here, I worked 45 hours, and I don’t think I’ve ever stopped since, since I’ve been working here.”
Breeding left the school for a period of time to run the Heartland Center with two other partners. However, the downtown business saw a downturn during the 2008 recession. She then went back to college and earned her bachelor’s, master’s and eight certificates in computer technology.
“I was running up against walls trying to find a job at that time,” said Breeding. “And so I ran into Linda Becker, who was secretary here, and she goes, ‘You know, we need someone again at ABC in the math room.’”
Breeding was happy to return. Her time at ABC-Stewart has also included teaching science, as well as doing dulcimer and computer camps during the summer.
In the classroom, Breeding takes great satisfaction in seeing her students learn and accomplish new things. She also feels that one of her biggest accomplishments was implementing eLearning at ABC-Stewart.
The Heritage Fund noted in its Reams Family Award announcement that Breeding was “instrumental in transitioning the school to eLearning during the pandemic.”
“I did set up the whole eLearning system when COVID happened and we were shut down,” Breeding said. “…We had two weeks for spring break that year, and I spent the whole second week getting up at 4 o’clock and working until 10 o’clock at night to get the eLearning into place.”
Cheryl Thill
Thill said pandemic has certainly brought challenges in education, a field she’s worked in for about 50 years.
“People are going to be discussing this for years to come, of how much the students have lost through this ordeal,” she said. “And you can’t blame any one group of people — the government or society in general — because we’ve been dealing with something that we’ve only studied in health books. I studied that when I was in school, but I never dreamed I’d live through one.”
Thill is in her third year at Columbus Christian School. She teaches interpersonal communications, speech, composition and literature to juniors and seniors in connection with Ivy Tech Community College for dual credit.
She knew she wanted to be a teacher from a young age.
“I don’t think that I chose education,” she said. “I think it chose me. … I was 8 years old, and I came one day, and I said, ‘I’m going to be a teacher.’ And that’s all I’ve ever wanted to do.”
After her teachers collected spelling papers, some students would throw them away, and Thill would ask if she could keep them. She then took the papers home, set up her mother’s dining room chairs in the living room and played school with her dolls, even asking for a blackboard and globe at Christmas.
Thill taught for a few years in Illinois and then worked for the Jennings County School Corp. before retiring in 2018, having worked 48 years in education.
When Thill initially left, she didn’t tell anyone what day she was retiring. The very next day, she had four interviews set up in Bartholomew County and Jackson County thanks to recommendations from individuals in Jennings County.
Thill job-shadowed optometrists and other positions. She then worked in the giftshop at a Cracker Barrel in Edinburgh for about a year and a half.
“I’m a doer,” she said. “I’m going to be 75 in about 11 days, but I don’t want to sit down. I don’t want to stop working. And I need to do something that I think is productive, in some way that I’m giving out in productive ways to society. So Columbus Christian called me, and I came up and interviewed, and they hired me.”
Her career has also included adjunct teaching at Purdue University, IUPUC and Ivy Tech Community College.
Thill said the best part of her job is the experience of actually witnessing students learn.
“That moment of discovery is wonderful, to understand that they’re conceptualizing what you’re teaching, that it’s opening up to them new conceptions, new perspections of life that they haven’t considered before,” she explained.
Thill, who has served as a foster mother, said that the experience, as well as interacting with her students, taught her more about her profession than a class could.
“They (students) were not just 28 or 32 people that came into a classroom and sit collectively,” she said. “They were individuals. They had stuff. I have stuff. I may not know what their stuff is. I may not need to know. But I have to recognize them as individuals, not just as a collective group of people. And I do believe being a foster mother helped me to do that, to see them for maybe what they had to do to get on the bus in the morning.”
Having that empathy, she said, helps teachers and students bond.
The Heritage Fund said in its announcement that Thill was being honored for her passion to see her students succeed.
“She encourages them to reach beyond boundaries they often set for themselves and is a team player who is respectful and genuine with her peers,” the foundation wrote.
Thill described her reaction to the award announcement as “flabbergasted, absolutely shocked, surprised, overwhelmed.” She also felt gratitude for the people that recommended her for the honor and was motivated to do more, even in her retirement.
“It humbles me to get this award, but it also creates a desire in me, at 75 years old, to be more vigorous in my preparedness, in my approach, in my delivery of education,” she said.
She added, “If I can impress any one student that they can be better than they think they are, if I, at this age, can inspire them to think about, that they can be whatever they want to be at whatever period of life they’re in, then I think that is an accomplishment — not only inside the classroom but outside the classroom.”
