After spending over 30 years as a paraprofessional in the district, Susan Carnagie is stepping back to focus on her six grandkids and to do more traveling with her husband.
Carnagie, who is retiring at the end of the school year, has been working in the life skills classroom for the last several years. She said it’s been fulfilling and rewarding.
In the life skills classroom, she gets to help students learn hands-on skills like cleaning and cooking. It helps students learn about different jobs and how to work in a work setting, she said.
Seeing students gain independence as well as learn new tasks and skills they will use throughout the rest of their lives makes it worth it. Seeing all the challenges students overcome and the moments things click has been rewarding, she said. Middle school is a time of such major changes, she said.
“It’s almost like winning a race,” she said. “Just to see the joy in their faces, and then I mean their comfortable-ness with me.”
Carnagie sees her students multiple hours each day from the beginning of sixth grade until they move on to high school.
There’s been one student who especially stole her heart and has kept her in the building until he moves on to ninth grade next year.
Because she sees her students as like her own, it’ll be an adjustment to not see them every day.
Carnagie ran into a former teacher at a garage sale who told her when the time for her to retire came, she would know.
“I was like, ‘You’re crazy,’” she said. “It was around Christmastime. Then it was like, it’s time. She was right.”
Carnagie was born and raised in Eudora, and she’s never considered leaving. She stayed home with her kids when they were young, and then once her youngest was preschool age, she started substitute teaching at the preschool.
She then started as a para at the elementary school before moving up to the middle school when her daughter was also moving to sixth grade. She was a resource para until moving to the life skills classroom.
The schedule has kept her in the position, she said. At first it was great for when she had kids in school, and it’s continued to be good for her grandkids, too.
Her co-workers and administrators have kept her in the district this long, she said.
More than anything, the last 30 years have made her a more patient person throughout all her life.
She’ll remember the outings, field trips and going to the store with students while watching them learn new skills in the real world as some of her favorite memories.
Carnagie isn’t completely ready to leave the district behind, though. She will eventually start working with students with special needs twice a week at the preschool and continue scorekeeping for sports at the middle and high school. She also plans to volunteer at the middle school library.
Going back to the preschool now like she was at the start of her career is sentimental, she said.
“Life’s going to come full-circle,” she said.
She’s been in the district so long it feels like she knows everyone, so she’ll miss having close connections around all the time.
Danny Ruegsegger, the former life skills teacher, said although he only worked with Carnagie three years, he realized quickly how much she loves Eudora and its schools.
As someone from a small town himself, it was refreshing to see, he said. Enough so that it almost gave him a homesick feeling for his own hometown, he said.
Eudora is important to her because it’s her home. She makes it feel like rather than working for a school district, she works for her home, he said.
“You’ve got a homegrown talent,” he said.
Go to just about any event in the district, and you’re sure to see her there, he said. It shows she cares about students in more than just an academic capacity.
“Susan is such a visible person – not only in the school but in the community supporting Eudora sports. I think kids see that. I think kids recognize that,” he said.
Although he left the district, the two still message about their mutual love of KU, and Ruegsegger said he knows she will be missed from the district. She deserves to retire and the chance to relax, he said.
Ryan Jacobs, a seventh grade social studies teacher, has been working with Carnagie for 16 years when he came to the district as a new young teacher.
Jacobs realized right off the bat that Carnagie was a fixture to not only the middle school but to the district. She made such a difference in making Jacobs feel welcomed when he was new to the building and Eudora. The friendship has only grown over the course of his time at the middle school.
It’s always seemed like Carnagie knows everything there is to know about kids in the district, whether because they’re in the same grade as a grandkid or because she’s watched them go through school themselves, or even knows their grandparents.
She knows students personally, even if they don’t know her, he said. She’s also worked in many different areas, which has only increased her ability to help and make students feel welcome.
“I think she’s able to approach the kids in a way that best works for them,” he said. “I think that just her relationship with the kids is probably the thing that is her greatest asset as a para at the middle school.”
Since she’s been working in life skills, he has not worked with Carnagie as much, but Jacobs said he thinks the role has given her a chance to let her personality shine with the kids.
Carnagie has always been able to help identify student struggles to make sure he can make sure they can better succeed, he said.
He’s happy to know she’ll have more time to spend with all her grandkids and with her recently retired husband, but he’s sad to see her go.
“It’s just having Susan in the hallways and having her in class, I’m just gonna miss being able to see her and just talk,” he said. “I’m just really appreciative of everything that Susan’s brought in my 16 years here.”
