Visit led to long career

While on leave from Vietnam in 1968, a chance visit to a cousin’s classroom led Steve Rodgers, 61, to a teaching career.

“I just loved that interaction,” Rodgers said about that visit. His cousin was a teacher in Spokane and had asked him to visit the classroom and talk about his experiences in the war.

Now, it is 36 years later and Rodgers has retired from Salnave Elementary School. His last position at the school was teaching fifth grade, but he started out teaching special needs children in Sandpoint.

That first year he taught a preschool girl who had been neglected – at 7 she still didn’t know how to talk. Rodgers said he often picked her up and carried her around the room showing her the pictures on the wall and saying the name of what was in the picture: a cow, a dog, a cat or a barn. He would also point to her, say her name, then point to himself and say his.

“In December, she said her name,” Rodgers said, getting emotional thinking about it. “I really feel like we got somewhere with that kid.”

He visited the student the next year and he was overjoyed when she smiled at him.

“It was just a thrill to break through to that little girl,” he said.

After Sandpoint, he taught in Bonners Ferry, Troy, Mont., and Libby, Mont. Although he and his wife Pam had loved the outdoors and living in Montana, they wanted to return to the Spokane area. In 1986, Rodgers was hired to teach in the resource room at Salnave Elementary.

“Cheney is a great community,” he said.

They raised their five children, Sara, 30, Jenna, 28, Lisa, 26, Breanne, 20, and Jeff, 18, in Cheney. They enrolled their kids in soccer, track, ballet and other programs in the parks and recreation department and they went to school in Cheney.

“I hear a lot about you from the whole community,” Pam told him. She said that wherever they go, not just in Cheney, but in Spokane, parents and former students approach him to say hello.

“He’s been very popular,” she said. In fact, Rodgers was selected as the Eastern Washington University Teacher of the Month. He said that award meant a lot to him, since he was nominated by one of his students.

Over the years, teaching has changed significantly. Rodgers said that when the Washington Assessment of Student Learning came along, it changed the way everyone taught. They became more focused on preparing students to take the test, and became consumed with results and data. Although Rodgers said that it took some of the fun out of the classroom, he admits teaching for the WASL has given students more skills to get through the tests.

“Students are more capable today than they were 20 years ago,” he said.

Now that he’s retired, Rodgers is working on getting his knees healthy so he and Pam can start having fun. Pam is semi-retired – she has worked as a speech pathologist, an academic adviser at Eastern Washington University, a stay-at-home mother and has been helping her mother manage some rental homes.

A motorcycle accident several years ago left Rodgers’s knees in bad shape and he had his left knee replaced last month. He has an appointment in October to have the other knee looked at, but after that, the two plan to travel, learn to play the piano, hike, snorkel and more. They also plan to give their married children a break and take their grandchildren for weekends.

He said he’ll miss so many of the people he met along the way – the students, the parents and the other educators.

“It’s just been a wonderful career,” he said.