After 17 years of nurturing and cultivating students for their futures, business teacher Laura Glenn has announced her retirement.

Before Glenn began teaching high school students, she worked as a certified public accountant (CPA), a registrar at Bellerive Elementary and a computer resource specialist at McKelvey Elementary. Being around students inspired Glenn to go back to school to receive her teaching certification.

“I’ve always wanted to be a teacher. When I was in high school, I wanted to be a physical education teacher, but I grew up in Minnesota and all the state colleges only made you come out with a teaching degree and we had way too many teachers,” Glenn said. “My parents said, ‘if you’re going to school to be a teacher, it’s on your dime. We’re not going to help you out,’ so I decided to instead explore pre-law, and then got into accounting.”

Since Glenn had already been writing web pages at McKelvey Elementary School, former principal Beth Plunkett agreed to hire her to pilot Web Design. This was important because it finally allowed teachers to make their own web pages for classes.  

“We were the first school to teach web design along with Central High, so I’m going to be the last [founder of the program] out since the other person has already retired. We started that legacy almost 18 years ago,” Glenn said. “South [High School] piloted multimedia and I said, ‘let’s bring it here.’ I’m always wanting to do new things and bring new programs, sometimes to the detriment of other programs because kids get excited about the new stuff. You lose some really good classes, but then you get some exciting new classes that attract students into the program.”  

Since Glenn values education, she always tried to pursue anything that allows her to branch out. In order to do this, Glenn took classes at St. Louis Community College of Forest Park every Saturday for a year. They started at 7 a.m. and went as late as 7 p.m.

“I’ve tried to be one of those teachers that aspires for all the learning, all the technology and all of the things that are changing. For example, networking,” Glenn said. “I swear, that was the hardest course I ever took because I had to take the class [for] people that want to go out and be networking technicians. I had to pass it with a higher grade than they did in order to teach it. I would come home and my brain would hurt from all of the content. Sometimes, [I] had to come down during the week to do labs because I didn’t have all of my equipment here to do the assignments.”

Despite the difficulty of the class, Glenn believes that it was still worth it.

“The class was really cool [because] you learn how computers work and learn how the network works,” Glenn said. “It’s incredible what the technology is and then you think about,‘who figured this out?’”

After taking Glenn’s classes junior and senior year, senior Nick Schumacher appreciates the work ethic she has instilled in him.

“She’s definitely a great teacher [because] I’ve consistently started slacking off less more and more the older I got,” Schumacher said. “In her class, I don’t know [why], but she’s always gotten me to do my work everyday. I just put my headphones in and work. That’s something no other teacher has been able to do.”

The best experience of teaching to Glenn is viewing how she has impacted students’ lives.  

“When the students come back and talk about what they’re doing now, and I can see a small part on how I might’ve influenced them. For example, being an accounting teacher, I have a lot of students that are accountants now and that’s kind of exciting,” Glenn said. “I have a student, Kaitlyn Yang, that has her own production studio doing effects on movies and she was in my Multimedia and Web Design class. I have students that are working in networking and cybersecurity. One is working for Blizzard Entertainment in L.A. So that’s really exciting to see how just a little bit of what I might’ve introduced them to here has turned into a career for them and something that they are excited about.”