Carleen B. Simmonds-Parsons

What started out as aspirations to become a chemist, Mrs. Simmonds-Parsons found herself with the very important task of educating the nation after she was persuaded to join the profession at the age of 17 by her mother Mrs. Daisy Simmonds also known as Teacher Daisy.

Our Young Professional says it was not very difficult being a teacher as she came from a family of teachers. That combined with her love for the job and her desire to succeed, she now holds the status of Principal of the Enis Adams Primary School at a fairly early age of her career. She is also the Director of Simmonds Preschool Limited, where she works behind the scenes to ensure that the high standard of that institution is maintained and the services offered provides developmentally appropriate experiences for the individual child.

“I planned never to be a teacher. I actually wanted to be a chemist but being a teacher is natural. I was a chemistry major when I started college and my mom encouraged me to go into education because she needed help with her preschool. The only problem is it is a labour of love. You don’t get paid well. There isn’t much mobility in the profession. So if you love children regardless of what you are doing, education will always be involved. But even if I was a chemist I would have probably been teaching Chemistry,” Mrs Simmonds- Parsons said with a smile.

Over the more than 16 years of teaching, our Young Professional has taught at all levels - from Pre-Kindergarden to Tertiary or Adult Education and has worked at Leonora Delville, Ebenezer Thomas, Althea Scatliffe and Joyce Samuel Primary schools and has also worked at the H. Lavity Stoutt Community College as an Adjunct Instructor in the Teacher Education Programme for ten years from which she retired in 2000.

This moving around in the system is one of the things that has kept her flame of enthusiasm burning brightly in a profession that is also sometimes viewed as monotonous.

“From year to year you forget what happen the year before because you are always meeting new people and new challenges so it is never boring, it is never monotonous, it’s never repeated so it is always interesting, challenging and exciting. It gets monotonous because some people don’t move as they stay at the same level of education. If they are a class three teacher they teach class three from the beginning until they retire. I have moved a lot. I have gone from pre-school to teaching at the college to working with kindergardeners going up to grade six. If you move around then you don’t get bored.”

Mrs. Simmonds-Parsons also said that the profession brings with it tremendous responsibilities that often keeps the teacher occupied. “When you are working with children you are working with their parents, the community and government agencies. There are many aspects that you are not bored in a school just sitting there. It’s not an office job. You have to get involved with the children, their counselling, mentoring, taking them out into the community, you are teaching them skills outside of academics.”

But apart from that, Mrs Simmonds-Parsons was able to qualify herself academically as since completing her public education in 1986, she has acquired a Bachelor of Science Degree in Early Childhood Education, a Masters of Education in Curriculum and Instruction and Masters credit in Leadership as well as studies in Business Management. She has studied at Towson State Universityin Maryland, Wright State University in Ohio, University of Phoenix in Arizona and Capella University in Minnesota.

As with every profession there are challenges and our Young Professional does not escape this phenomenon. “The challenge right now in our education system is staffing and being a middle manager who does not have very much control over what teachers do. So without having that direct power over your immediate subordinates it’s really up to them whether they want to do what they are supposed to do or not. Cause it takes so long for the process of getting them evaluated. It’s not effective. You can motivate, you can model, you can create the right environment and if they don’t do what they are supposed to do you send in your paperwork and it takes almost the whole school year for almost anyone to reprimand them or call them into a meeting if they ever get called into a meeting.”

But despite these challenges and others, which many other persons in the teaching profession could bear testimony to, Mrs. Simmonds- Parsons has no intentions of leaving but rather retiring in that same profession that she did not necessarily end up in by choice. “Older educators like to say you must love children to be a teacher. I say you must have the gift to impart knowledge and to understand how someone learns and help them to learn in order to be a teacher and then it motivates you to keep going.”

Our Young Professional also said interacting with the children gives her much joy and self-gratification, knowing that she can impact positively on each child, the way they need to be impacted upon. “Some children come to school just needing someone to talk to and that’s their day...and some children come to school having everything and ready to excel and move on and they don’t need you that much. They just need to know that they have that guidance from you. So every child is different and so your interaction would be different and it’s fulfilling in its own way.”

Asked what would be her encouragement for Virgin Islanders to enter the profession, Mrs. Simmonds-Parsons had quite an interesting answer. “In the BVI we have never been encouraged to become teachers. We have been encouraged to become learners, to develop skills in trades and industries outside of education. I don’t think we have ever marketed education. I think it is a fluke that we have any BVIslanders in education. I think the other Caribbean countries push education a lot more.”

While acknowledging the contributions of the H. Lavity Stoutt Community College, Mrs. Simmonds-Parsons noted that in other Caribbean countries there are universities. “People stay in the country. Most of us move out of the country and when we get out there sometimes it looks so good that we don’t come back. So if we are not coming back then we have to hire expatriates to come in and educate the youths.”

Asked what she would like to see in the education system in the next five to ten years, Mrs. Simmonds-Parsons said the most important thing for her is to see a focus on gifted students. “Right now we are looking at special needs and we are still not doing as well in that area as we should be doing. We are ignoring our gifted students. We should target the gifted students such as in Science or Mathematics or singing and dancing and get them into magnet schools in other countries and give them scholarships for high school. Train them well outside of the country and bring them back home. You don’t have to wait until they graduate high school to give them a scholarship.”

But our Young Professional is not just a principal but continues to go beyond the call of duty. The mother of three dedicates a lot of her time to the Adopt-a-School Programme of which she is the committee’s chairperson, a position she also did not bargain for but nevertheless continues to give her best.  “I was being nosy. I wanted my school to be adopted. I was at Althea Scatliffe at the time so I called up the past chairperson Ms. Claudette Saunders and I started to work with her to get Althea Scatliffe adopted. It’s a very challenging job as it takes a lot of your time. And I worked with her for about a year trying to get several schools adopted and with personal difficulties that she was having at the time I ended up having to take the post.”

But thanks to the vision, determination, and astuteness of Mrs. Simmonds- Parsons and others before her, all the public primary schools in the programme have been adopted by at least one corporate sponsor and a few other sponsors are lined up for next year.

Her advice to young people: “Education is not just about going to school and opening a book and trying to remember everything that is in the book. It’s about learning how to live. It’s about knowing what you want and what you need to know and what you need to develop in order to get that. That is your education. If you can figure out what you want out of life and how to get it and you learn what you need to learn to get it then you have been educated.”