In connection with National Teacher Appreciation Week, swark.today salutes our area teachers and offers profiles of several who have made essential contributions to bringing our youngsters along toward bright futures and greater control of their lives.

Haley Hinton, who teaches Family and Consumer Sciences at Blevins High School, holds a bachelor’s degree in finance, so her students have access to a money expert as they look to understand the subjects she teaches.

“In my eighth and ninth grade class, we just finished going over checking accounts, and how to check your balances and do a transaction register and a deposit ticket and fill out a check,” Hinton said, noting that many students today have little familiarity with checks because “they’re so used to swiping a card.” But the value of this knowledge for running a household or a business remains, since it allows for close scrutiny of their respective financial health information.

She added that students also study “credit scores and interest rates” as part of the curriculum on the grounds that “it’s important information, no matter what time of life you’re in.”

For Hinton, however, the path into teaching was not as clear cut as a balance sheet.

“As a child, I always wanted to teach,” she said, recalling that she and her stepsister would spend hours “playing school” using old workbooks and classroom materials their teachers discarded at the end of the year. The interest became so pronounced, she said, that “my mom, for Christmas, got us desks” along with toy typewriters and classroom materials.

Even her high school yearbook reflected those ambitions. “Beside my graduation picture was that I wanted to be a teacher,” she said.  She also hoped eventually to become a high school counselor.

After graduating, however, she began working at the Bank of Blevins and shifted directions academically. “I decided to change my major to finance,” Hinton said. “So that’s what I had, a bachelor’s degree in business finance.”

She worked for the bank for several years and, after college, later held additional finance-related positions before family circumstances and the approaching school years of her children brought education back into focus. “My husband works on the road,” she said. “And I wanted to do something where I was going to be at the school, since they were starting school.”

Without a teaching degree at the time, Hinton applied for an opening as high school secretary at Blevins and remained in that role for nine years. “I just saw my love of [education] come back,” she said

Eventually, administrators encouraged her to pursue certification through the Arkansas Professional Educator Pathway program, known as ARPEP.  “And so that’s what I did,” Hinton said, noting that balancing coursework, teaching responsibilities and raising children while her husband traveled for pipeline work was initially daunting.

This year completes her third year teaching at Blevins High School, though she has now worked in the district for more than a decade overall.

Hinton teaches students ranging from eighth through twelfth grade in the school’s Career and Technical Education program, with classes that include Family and Consumer Sciences (FACS), Food Safety and Nutrition, Child Growth and Development and Dynamics of Human Relationships.

“I love FACS because it just incorporates so many necessary, everyday skills,” she said, describing lessons that can range from cooking and sewing to ironing, laundry and household management. “These are life skills that maybe not all kids have.”

Meanwhile, cooking classes remain especially popular among students. “They’re teenagers,” Hinton said. “They love to eat. They love to cook.”

One recent assignment challenged students to select or create recipes and then prepare them while also producing detailed instructional recipe posters. “My only constraints were we’re only in class about 52 or 53 minutes, so it had to be something that you can make in that amount of time,” she said.

Students responded with dishes ranging from the Grillo’s Pickle Dip recipe that has gone viral lately to a layered chocolate-and-red-velvet cake with raspberry filling and cream cheese frosting.

“I was a little skeptical at first,” Hinton admitted of the cake project, especially as the frosting the students made initially failed to cooperate. “But this group is really just determined it’s going to work and they’re going to make it.”

The end result, she said, “turned out great.”

Another group, which included her middle son, prepared fried red snapper bites using fish caught during a trip to Galveston.

“I was proud of them,” Hinton said about the whole project, because “none of those recipes were something that they had made before.”

Teaching her own children, meanwhile, has provided its own set of memorable moments. “My oldest, he’s just the typical older child,” Hinton said. “He was really good in class.”

Her middle son, however, has proven somewhat more challenging. “That middle kid, I don’t know.  [He’s a] typical middle child,” she said with a laugh. “He has to be warned several times.”

Hinton said she has even assigned him detention. “I want to be completely fair,” she said. “If I can’t expect good behavior out of my own kid, I certainly can’t expect it out of the rest of them.”

Her son, she added, has not always appreciated the arrangement. "He thinks it's a personal insult to him that we have to do work," she said, chuckling again.

Beyond recipes and classroom humor, Hinton stands on the practical importance of the material students encounter in Family and Consumer Sciences. That includes helping students understand spending habits and financial pressures, especially in a culture heavily influenced by social media and online marketing.

“Little amounts add up to big amounts,” Hinton said, describing classroom discussions about spending on small items during trips uptown or forays into online shopping.

She has also invited her husband Jarrod Hinton, Superintendent at Price Gregory International, an infrastructure building company, to speak with students about the pipeline industry and the realities of managing high incomes responsibly. “He told them, ‘I know people who make $2,000 or $3,000 a week, and by the next payday they’re broke,’” she said.

Hinton also talks with students about her own time growing up before smartphones and constant online connection. “We got home, we interacted with our brothers and sisters,” she said. “We were in person, not on the phone.”

Students, she noted, often respond with surprise.

“They always say, ‘Well, that sounds really fun,’” Hinton said. “And I say, ‘It was.’”

For Hinton, teaching represents not only a profession but the fulfillment of something she believes she was always intended to do. “I feel like I’m one of the luckiest people to have a second chance at doing what I had always wanted to do in the beginning,” she said.

While she does not regret her years in finance, she acknowledged, “I don’t think that’s ever where my calling was.” Instead, she said, the greatest rewards come from both the material she teaches and the relationships she builds with students daily.

She described moments when students have approached her not only about coursework but personal struggles as well. “If you can make their day better while they’re at school, then by all means,” she said.

Asked what she would tell young people considering education as a career, Hinton acknowledged the financial realities while strongly encouraging pursuit of the profession, though she is grateul for the raises provided to new teachers as part of Arkansas’ LEARNS Act. But for Hinton, her career is not about the money. “It is the most rewarding job,” she said. “Working with kids…it’s so rewarding just to see them grow and learn.”

And for those who feel drawn toward the classroom, she believes the impact is difficult to equal elsewhere. “How much more of an impact can you have,” Hinton said, “than teaching young people in order for them to build and grow?”

Above photo of Hinton by April Lovette.