Perhaps it’s in the blood or a God-given talent for nurturing the minds and hearts of children. But for Jean (Hilts) Bluhm and her family, teaching has been a career of choice for a century.
It’s also a Tiger tradition of Trailblazers as three generations have graduated from Centralia College and taught students in the Centralia School District.
Jean’s mother, Alice Gray Hilts, started teaching at a one-room school in North Dakota, where she also served as principal and janitor. She taught at a Mennonite settlement in Montana and Valley City College in North Dakota before moving in 1947 to Napavine, where she spent 24 years teaching students, including her children and her brother. Returning World War II veterans told her the poems she made them memorize helped them survive tense days of battle, according to a 1988 Daily Chronicle article. Alice retired in 1970 and passed away in 1997.
In North Dakota, where she was born, Jean lived on the school grounds in a trailer without electricity, with an outhouse as a bathroom and a small kerosene stove for heating and cooking. Then her family moved to Washington, where she graduated from Napavine High School in 1951. After completing two years of study at Centralia College, she transferred to Bellingham and earned both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education from Western Washington State College. Jean’s mother attended college with her because, despite holding a life teaching certificate from North Dakota, Alice needed nearly two years of classes to teach in Washington.
Jean began teaching fourth and fifth grades at Olympic School in Chehalis in 1955 and later at Cascade School. A decade later, she landed a job teaching English at Centralia High School, where she also directed high school and Centralia College plays and musicals for two decades. She retired in 1985. Her sister, Shirley Valeos, dedicated her 35-year career to teaching at Columbia River High School in Vancouver.
Jean married Mel Bluhm in 1953 and raised their family in Chehalis.
Jean said she enjoyed teaching.
“I think the rewarding part is being with kids, seeing their future, and seeing if they can appreciate more than just sports, more than just money, or more than just whatever they set for their gods,” she said.
She wanted them to realize they’re important.
“I always loved teaching — just loved it,” she said.
As for challenges, she said teachers today face far more difficulties than her generation did.
“Teaching is changing, and I wish it weren’t,” she said. “I believe we still need this background of faith and faithfulness and work and loyalty to the class.”
She saw it, especially when putting on plays. But it’s different now.
When she substituted in the 1990s, she noticed the flexibility teachers once had to reach students where they are had faded with the onslaught of state-mandated curriculum, forcing them to follow a script. She also said parents in the past disciplined their children at home, which resulted in better behavior at school. If a student acted out, the teacher could call the parents. But now, many parents put the responsibility for the student’s behavior back on the teachers.
“I feel like they’ve taken the bandages away from the teacher,” she said.
All three of Jean’s children — Sheri Davis, Jerry Bluhm and Deb Parnham — majored in education, but only Deb, a 1975 W.F. West graduate, made it a career. After two years at Centralia College, she earned her education degree from Central Washington University in 1979 and taught elementary physical education in Centralia, where her career overlapped with her mother’s for six years. Deb earned her master’s degree from Leslie in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
She wanted to teach physical education to let students know they can have fun even if they aren’t natural athletes and earn grades for their efforts.
“I want people to love being asked to play and to enjoy sports and a quality of life,” she said. “And, of course, I love the hours. I love being a parent and teacher and having that time with my kids.”
Her first school was Washington Elementary in Centralia, where she remained for 36 years. She also taught reading, history and middle school physical education.
“The best part for me was to see kids who didn’t like to do something try it and then decide that was OK,” Deb said, whether it was badminton, bowling, running or ball games. “You didn’t have to get an eight-minute mile. If it took you 15 minutes to do the mile, it’s a success. You completed it.”
She also loved directing the sixth-graders in the Cispus Outdoor Learning Program for 28 years.
“The challenges have changed a bit, and the state does put on more restrictions of what you can and can’t do,” she said. “The parental involvement is a challenge too.”
It wasn’t always easy to gain support from parents, she said, which forced teachers to be creative.
“You cannot deny them if they come with that lack of support,” she said. “You are the nurturer. You are the feeder giving them food, and you are the one teaching them the behaviors that you hoped they would have come with.”
When Deb married Kirk Parnham 31 years ago, they blended their families — her four children and his three.
After retiring in 2015, Deb followed her husband’s work to other towns where she substituted in Hermiston, Oregon, North Bend, Washington, and the Snohomish Valley. Schools there have so many resources because their larger tax base yields more tax dollars.
“I saw the other half of the haves and the have-nots,” she said.
Then, her grandson, Noah Jon Markstrom, was diagnosed with brain cancer, so she returned to Lewis County to help.
“I was thankful I wasn’t teaching so I had the time and opportunity,” she said.
Noah, the son of Kyle and Kara Markstrom, was 6 when he died Nov. 6, 2019. He has a little sister, Natalie Jean, named after her great-grandmother.
At that time, the Centralia School Board had an opening, so she ran for election and won. She assumed her position in December 2021.
“I just wasn’t ready to say goodbye to education,” she said. “I heard that they had just hired this dynamite superintendent, so I got to know Lisa (Grant), and I thought, ‘I want to be on her team.’ She’s a great ambassador for Centralia.”
So is Deb’s daughter, Tana Rogerson, who has taught special education students in Centralia for the past year. She’s a 2003 graduate of Centralia High School and, after two years at Centralia College, earned a general degree from The Evergreen State College in Olympia and a master’s in education from Saint Martin’s University in Lacey.
She didn’t initially want to teach.
“I was like, nope — that’s the family business. I’m not going to do that,” she said.
But after earning her bachelor’s degree, she worked at a daycare and enjoyed her time with kids. That’s when she decided to pursue a career in teaching. She started teaching in the Rochester School District but now teaches special education at Fords Prairie Elementary School in the Centralia School District.
Her mother recalled when Tana worked as a high school counselor for the sixth-grade Cispus Outdoor Learning Program, which she directed. Tana taught salmon and aquatics at her station.
“She had those sixth-graders’ attention,” Deb recalled. “I felt that she would be a natural at this because she was just so good. She also did math tutoring at the middle school. So even though she didn’t want to walk in it, it was in her blood.”
As a special education teacher, Tana said, “I see potential and hope in kids that some people don’t see.”
She enjoys testing out those abilities while understanding that some students follow a different path to learning. They don’t all reach the reading and writing milestones at the same time.
The COVID-19 pandemic and shutdown of schools proved challenging to teachers, students and parents, Tana said. After missing in-school interaction for more than a year, she said, “It’s a completely different world, and it’s a completely different student that you are handling.”
Technology also proves challenging with students grappling with social media demands and cyberbullying. Students fell behind in most districts during the pandemic hiatus. But Tana said the educational demands for reading, writing, science and math also must be juggled with the soft skills teaching of kindness, civil conversation and how to deal with social and emotional needs.
“Some of those soft skills that weren’t necessarily taught previously — they kind of were just expected you had them,” Tana said. “Now, we have to be more intentional about that, and it’s hard because you still have 90 minutes of reading this and that and all this other curriculum.”
Test scores fell after the pandemic with years of online teaching. More children suffered from unreported abuse, too.
“It was challenging for everybody,” Tana said. “We did our best. We did a lot of supplemental curricula — worksheets, activities — just trying to hit everybody’s needs, but it was it was a lot of extra work.”
Teachers and students have struggled to make up for lost time since returning to classrooms wearing masks and maintaining social distances.
As for the Centralia district’s February levy failure, Deb and Tana said only 38 percent of registered voters cast ballots, and the election coincided with property owners receiving in the mail significant increases in assessed values, which translates into higher taxes. Lower test scores, which are seen in most districts after COVID-19, also may have contributed to the lack of support for the levy.
“We do want to have high expectations for our students,” Tana said. “We want them to be competent readers and writers and mathematicians and scientists, but it’s one measurement of their success in one measurement of their future.”
“Test scores are tough when you don’t have the common denominator of coming to school fed, rested, feeling good about yourself and feeling safe,” Deb said.
School districts receive federal and state funding but also depend on local levy money.
The levy pays for mental health counselors and school resource officers, a huge investment at a time when school shootings and suicides among young people are increasing each year. This year alone, the United States has already seen 17 school shootings resulting in 18 deaths, the latest on March 27 at a Nashville Christian elementary school that killed three 9-year-old students, an administrator, a substitute teacher, and a janitor. Deb said she wrote to state legislators saying that school resource officer positions should be funded by the state rather than relying on local money that might not be there if levies fail.
School shootings are a terrifying stressor for students and teachers that Jean never dealt with in her teaching career.
The levy also pays for art, music, and extracurricular sports programs, which Deb described as part of the social, emotional, and mental health of students looking for a place to belong.
Levy failures cause difficulties. Jean recalled a double levy failure in the early 1970s that forced closure of the junior high and double-shifting in the high school to accommodate instruction of all students.
The family business of teaching in Jean’s family even extends to in-laws. Her sister-in-law, Janet Bluhm, was a teacher for nearly three decades in Longview, and her daughter-in-law, Kelly Bluhm, retired after teaching high school English in Chehalis for more than 20 years.
Jean has nine biological grandkids and 12 altogether, while Deb has eight on earth and two in heaven (Noah and a stillborn baby). The teaching gene may have been passed down to the next generation. She recalled seeing her six-year-old granddaughter, Makenna Rogerson, reading to her one-year-old cousin.
“Makenna was sitting there reading books, and she would read and then turn around and show us the pictures,” Deb said.
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at memoirs@chaptersoflife.com.
