By By LYDIA GRIMES Feature Reporter
Jane Henderson is a very busy lady. She has raised four children and taught school, all within Escambia County and is now the principal of Escambia-Brewton Technical School.
She was raised in the county and attended W.S. Neal schools, graduating from W.S. Neal High School in 1970.
It led her to do public speaking and when she went to college, that was her major. She taught it off and on for over 25 years at JDCC and taught math and English at the high school level.
Like most children Henderson did not realize at that time just how much her mother did for her. She now knows that her mother, who was a cosmetologist, traded out her work for lessons for her daughter to get all those lessons.
After graduation from high school, she went to Trevecca University in Nashville.
Henderson stayed in Nashville for a year before coming back to Brewton. It was at that time that Jefferson Davis Junior College became operational and her father wanted her to come home and attend a school closer by.
Tom Henderson was in his last quarter at Auburn and was working in a drug store in Andalusia. He said he woke up that morning and decided to come to Brewton to church. Her mother invited him home to lunch after church and that changed Henderson's life.
She received a scholarship to get her master's degree at the University of Alabama and they moved to Tuscaloosa.
They moved to Brewton and she got a job teaching at McCall while Tom went to work as a pharmacist at Revco Drug Store. She also taught night classes at Jefferson Davis Junior College.
Henderson said that she felt her job was to make good citizens as well as scholars. That belief has followed over to the technical school. She said that statistics show that only 81 percent of students ever finish college. That is why she believes that students who do not intend to go to college need career skills.
She later became assistant principal at W.S. Neal Middle School before going to the technical school. The enrollment continues to rise and at the present time, there are around 280 students attending Escambia-Brewton Career Technical School.
The Hendersons have four children, Tera, who is an occupational therapist; Bret, who is a chemical engineer; Kyle, who is majoring in marketing and Erin who attends Flomaton High School and wants to be a history professor.
They live in the McCall community where they have plenty of room. Tom likes to garden and she loves to work with flowers when he is not working at Medical Center Pharmacy. She loves music and directs the choir at their church, the Church of the Nazarene in East Brewton. She also plays the piano, but she says she is not a singer herself.
Henderson is truly someone who loves what she does. It's a good thing to be able to be happy in both the home and the job, but she has managed to do that very thing.