I learned this week that there were two teacher candidates from each of the 50 states for the ill-fated Challenger mission by reading an article in the Charleston Gazette.

Melanie Vickers was a teacher candidate from West Virginia, and she knew Christa McAuliff in a NASA training class. After the Challenge explosion, Vickers helped raise funds to create a memorial statue for Christa McAuliff in Charleston near the former Sunrise Museum.

Melanie Vickers said she believed that “Christa would want us to protect the future and show our children what’s possible … And that the future sits in our classrooms every day.” This West Virginia memorial to Christa McAuliff supports her most famous quotation, “I touch the future. I teach.”

Such inspiring words keep many teachers going in the middle of those difficult days when our legislators are taking funds away from public schools and leaving poor children with much less effective support for their learning process. We know that children who drop out of school are much more likely to go to prison than those who finish high school.

Education is the biggest item on most state budgets, but now inflation requires that we spend more on everything. Most of all, we need to invest in building our workforce. Going to prison is an expensive way to live on tax dollars, and about 40% of inmates are dyslexic. They need individual help to improve their reading skills. We could save tax money if we would give extra funding to help any poor readers to improve their skills at any age. Schools do not cost nearly as much as prisons per person.

Teachers give their lives to help the next to make a difference in their own future. Even retired teachers do make a difference. This week The Inter-Mountain featured an article about Jay Saseen volunteering to teacher CPR at Youth Health.

The slogan “old teachers never lose their class” was on a tea towel that delighted my Aunt Mary Gamble Kump when she was over 70 years old and still teaching in American Air Force dependent schools in the Philippines.

Finally, when she retired and came back to live in Elkins, she continued to teach Bible School, read stories aloud at the library, and find younger folks to teach whenever possible.

If “old soldiers never die,” it must be true that “old teachers never lose their class” because teachers touch the future.

Now we older people need to pay taxes for public schools if we expect to have helpers in our nursing homes.