Our thanks to Jason Collum with the Red Bay News for allowing us to reprint this article.
After 30 years of teaching home economics classes at Red Bay, Sherry Hutcheson decided it was time to leave the classroom for retirement at the end of the school year in May. That has not meant life has slowed for her any, though. Quite the opposite, the summer has been a busy one for Hutcheson, who was honored in July with a statewide award for her contributions in the classroom.
Hutcheson received the overall Lifetime Achievement Award on July 20 in Mobile from the Alabama Association for Career and Technical Education. The award was a surprise for Hutcheson, who believed she was only attending the ceremony for a different honor.
“I knew I was getting the Family Consumer Science Lifetime Achievement Award, but I did not know I was getting the overall Career Tech award,” Hutcheson said.
Hutcheson was nominated by friend and Jacksonville State University instructor Kim Mitchell. Mitchell told Hutcheson around the first of June she was nominated for the Family Consumer Science award. Mitchell had Hutcheson submit some paperwork for the award, but then came back needing more.
“She said, ‘I need you to fill out some more papers,’ so I went back and filled them out,” Hutcheson said. “I didn’t know until I got down there that I got the overall Alabama Career Tech award.”
Receiving the award capped a busy summer for Hutcheson. She and her husband, Toby, and Red Bay High School assistant principal, Dr. Jacqueline Parsons, designed and painted a bright, colorful mural featuring characters from the Peanuts comic strip on the side of a building at the Red Bay Elementary playground. And she’s not finished yet as she and Parsons will be painting a new concrete Tiger sculpture that has been mounted on a concrete based outside the school cafeteria. Between these projects and family responsibilities, Hutcheson has not had much time to figure out what retirement looks like.
“Mrs. Parsons keeps finding things for me to do,” Hutcheson said.
Service to the school
While at Red Bay, Hutcheson helped for 16 years on chairing the annual prom committee. Barbara Cashion first got Hutcheson involved with helping on the prom, and quickly thereafter handed off the reigns to Hutcheson.
Hutcheson and her students also helped in cooking for various events, such as for coaches before games and helping with steak sandwich fundraiser for the school. She said she enjoyed cooking for her fellow teachers for the annual teacher tailgate party prior to the Alabama-Auburn football game.
If these things didn’t point to Hutcheson’s dedication to her job, her students, and fellow faculty members, the fact she drove every school day from her home near Phil Campbell – putting more than a million miles across four different vehicles – is testament to what Red Bay High School has meant to Hutcheson.
Her major from Auburn University was in family resource management, but a hiring freeze in the state kept her from getting a job with the extension service. She was later encouraged to get her teaching degree, which she did, and then was able to begin her service in education when Irene Bolton retired from the home economics post at Red Bay in 1992.
The work she performed and the efforts she gave in leading her classes through the years culminated in the awards she received this summer, but the ever-humble Hutcheson did not go looking for these honors. They instead found her. And, even though she’s retired, the award means she now qualifies for additional potential honors.
“I never expected to get the award for all the career tech teachers in the state,” Hutcheson said. “Now I found out I get to do regional competitions. The person who wins the Lifetime Achievement Award gets to compete regionally. We get to show what we’ve done in our careers and then if you win the regional competition, you get to go to the nationals.”
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