Photo by Trip Burns.
At night around the dinner table, Daisy Harness, a biology teacher, passed a bowl of green beans to her husband, Kermit Harness, a principal and band director. Depending on the night, Kermit then passed the green beans down the table to a whole host of aunts and uncles, each of them fine educators in their own right.
The bowl would eventually make it all the way down to Daisy and Kermit's eldest daughter, then known as Charlotte Harness.
Between bites of their supper, they would talk about how to improve the way we educate children, how some students did or didn't behave, and even the itineraries of upcoming field trips. When she was in high school, Charlotte didn't know what she wanted to do with her life, but she did know one thing: She would never be an educator.
Charlotte went to Millsaps College from 1984 to 1988. She wanted to help people so she figured being a medical doctor would be an ideal direction for her. Although she began as a pre-med major, Seals found out when she graduated with a major in science education that her commitment to "never be an educator" might not prove to be binding.
The August after her graduation in 1988, Charlotte married Calvin Seals. As the first few bills began coming in, Charlotte Seals remembers her husband turning to her and asking, "Well, you are going to start teaching, right?"
She began teaching at Yazoo City High School. She taught a full gambit of biology, chemistry and general science to students from 9th to 10th grade. Because of her education-centric family, Seals found it strange that school wasn't always on her students' minds.
"Many of my students were from impoverished backgrounds," Seals says. "It taught me to be flexible in the classroom."
In 1989, Seals began her rise in the Madison County School District. That year she took an opening at Rosa Scott High School in the district. There she taught 8th grade science, until they asked her to be the school's assistant principal in 1994. In 1997, she became Madison Station Elementary School's principal.
There, she worked to build the fine arts program until 2000, when Superintendent Mike Kent asked Seals to work at the school district's main office.
Today Charlotte Seals, 48, is the associate superintendent for the Madison County School District, and this year, she became president-elect of the Junior League of Jackson. Her eldest daughter, Ashley, 23, is a Louisiana State University graduate working in Texas, and her son, Austin, 18, goes to Germantown High School in the district she supervises.
Although education is clearly in the bloodline, Charlotte Seals still keeps the old adage, saying, "What I do isn't a job; it's a calling. You just got to live what you love, and the rest will fall in its place."
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