Weaver retiring from JCHS

“The whole retirement thing, it’s life changing.”
Mindy Weaver will turn in the keys to her classroom at Jay County High School today and won’t return as a teacher next year as she retires from the school she’s taught at for 38 years.
“Even though I’m not going to be teaching anymore, I don’t see it as an end to anything,” she said.
Still, it’s scary for her to consider not returning as a teacher.
“I live a few minutes from here and there’s not a day that goes by that I’m not doing something in this school. So that’s scary that Monday I’m going to turn over those keys and not be in here like that again.”
She’s coached cheerleading for 35 years at the high school and has played countless other roles, too, including assistant girls basketball coach, junior class sponsor and pep club sponsor.
She’s also been active in the teacher’s association.
As a physics teacher, she has taught a wide variety of students, though Weaver said many once saw it as a class for those who wanted to become engineers or were the “brightest and the best.”
“I felt like I really had a different approach,” she said. “We have a lot of kids take physics.”
She teaches a few hundred students a year with as many as 30 students in a class at a time, which is much larger than the class sizes she had at the start of her career.
“I have to laugh, one of the first years here one of my physics classes reached 20 students, and the chairman of the department apologized and said that would never happen again,” she said.
Though she’s spent most of her career teaching physics at JCHS, she also spent a year teaching at Pendleton Heights High School after college and another year at East Jay Middle School.
And teaching is the only career she ever wanted.
“I don’t remember ever considering anything else,” she said. “A lot of teachers were influential in my life so I hoped to be able to do that for my students.”
The lifelong Jay County resident, who student taught at Jay County High School in its first year under her high school physics teacher, says she loves teaching here because of the support the community shows for the schools.
“The Jay County community has always been supportive of the schools and the school programs, and so it’s been an easy place to work, a rewarding place to work.”
Principal Phil Ford has worked with Weaver since she began teaching with him during his second year at the high school. The two taught in the same large classroom, with Weaver teaching physics and Ford teaching chemistry.
“At the time we taught together, she was probably one of my best friends in the building,” he said. “There’s not anybody that I’ve ever worked with that’s more dedicated than Mindy.”
Weaver has been devoted to her students, cheerleaders and Jay County for all 38 years she’s worked there, Ford added.
“She’s 100 percent Jay County,” he said.[[In-content Ad]]