By BY LYDIA GRIMES Feature Writer
Carolyn Brown is the guidance counselor at W.S. Neal Middle School. In fact she is the first and only counselor that the school has had. She has been nominated for Counselor of the Year by a fellow worker.
She takes her job with the students very seriously and they love her for her caring way of dealing with them. She is in her element when she is working with the kids on a day-to-day basis.
Not only does she counsel them but she tries to instill responsibility and unity into their daily life. She councils the students about their career choices, their personal needs, is a mediator between students and she also coordinates tests and evaluations. She is a student council sponsor and leads the youngsters in a lot of community and school activities. Each home room has two representatives on the student council and Brown works with them on various projects. It teaches them to take responsibility and grow into good citizens who contribute to the community.
The school also has a mentoring program to help other students.
Brown is in charge of various testing and does referrals for recognition of students for their accomplishments.
Gayle Fountain, Principal of W.S. Neal Middle School, is very glad to have had Brown as guidance counselor all these years.
Brown was born in Dothan and grew up on her parents farm eight miles from Ashford with three siblings -- and to them hard work was a reality.
She graduated from Ashford High School in 1964 and went to Troy State University. It was already a foregone conclusion that she would be working with children,
They were engaged and soon married in 1968. They went to Evergreen, his home town, and lived there for eight years while he taught school and she taught adult education.
She has taught and counseled at various places around the area including summer work at Southern Normal with the Upward Bound Program with students that learned things they might not have learned otherwise. The Browns welcomed Stephen (1970) and Josh (1973) into the family and came to Brewton in 1971 thinking it was a good move. He began to teach at Monroeville and she taught at North Brewton.
When North Brewton School closed she went to work at W.S. Neal teaching school for several years. She became the counselor at Neal, Flomaton and McCall before working strictly at Neal where she is today.
A couple of years ago she was part of the faculty that made the move into the new school building on Williamson Street.
Her husband, Wendell, has been a teacher part of the time and a home builder part of the time over the years. He is now in the process of building a home for their retirement on Lake Martin and another place for their son, Josh, on the Alabama River.
Their son Stephen is in his third year of residency of orthopedic surgery at UAB. He and his wife Melinda have one son, Lawson, who is 15 months old. Josh is a Natural Resources Appraiser with the Federal Land Bank in Montgomery.
When she is away from the school she enjoys working in the yard where she cuts her own grass and does all sorts of gardening work. She loves to read and cook, and camping at Lake Martin. She and her husband are members of First Baptist Church of Brewton and have been teaching Sunday school for many years.