Future teachers get a pointer
Back in 1970, students at Chartiers-Houston High School who were seniors and members of Future Teachers of America took the places of their instructors for a day. Some went on to pursue other avenues in life, but at least two of the young people in this week’s Mystery Photo entered the profession and are still teaching today.
Rodney Sickles, who was shop teacher for a day, was not one of them. He went to work for Washington Steel, retiring after 32 years. He lived in Houston until moving to Chartiers Township in 1998. He’s gone back to work now for Field & Stream’s store in the Old Mill shopping center. He’s shown in the photo pointing to work being done by Randy Glunt, who was a sophomore at the time.
Glunt went to work as a coal miner after high school. When he was laid off after 18 years, he worked in various construction jobs and for his family’s waterbed store. He went back to work in the mines for another 14 years before retiring. He has three daughters and two grandchildren and was remarried in 2006.
“The person with the glasses on is Gary Popiolkowski,” wrote Dave Luongo, an admiring former student. “He went on to be one of the greatest science teachers in Western Pa.”
Popiolkowski went to then-California State College and returned to teach in the Chartiers-Houston district after graduation in 1974. And he’s still there.
“I’ve been a middle-school science teacher all 40 years,” Popiolkowski said. “There are only two of us now who have been here that long, but I’m having too much fun with the technology and new innovations to think about retiring.”
Popiolkowski’s father, Louis, was a teacher at Canon-McMillan High School. Gary and his wife, Lori, have a son, Matt, and a daughter, Jennifer Weiss, who teaches third grade at Borland Manor – three generations of teachers.
Chris Andy Bitz also became a teacher. She attended Bethany College and graduated from Washington & Jefferson College. She was a substitute and has now been teaching social studies at John F. Kennedy Middle School for 27 years.
“Some of my friends who called me about the photo in the paper thought it was a picture of my daughter,” Chris said. She and her husband, Dennis, have three children and a grandchild. Daughter Alexsandra, apparently, looks just like her mother did at a younger age.
Popiolskowski and Bitz were officers of the Future Teachers club. The other two boys in the photo were Rusty Cowden, who was president of Student Council, and Bill “Deacon” Jones, who was president. Jones is deceased.
Cowden is a member of the family that has been farming in Washington County now for eight generations – since before 1790. He graduated from W&J College in 1979, had a career as a banker, and earned his master of divinity degree from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in 1990. He is now pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Warren, Ohio. “I am married to the Rev. Carolyn Griffeth, currently the interim pastor at First Presbyterian Church of Columbiana. We have four boys between us, each counting two sons and two stepsons,” he wrote in his biography on the church website.
Leon Jones recalled that his brother was a good student who played football for the Buccaneers, who were almost unbeatable those years. “He was very popular; everybody knew Deacon,” he said.
Jones said his brother worked for more than 20 years for Burgunder Dodge in Bridgeville. He died about seven years ago from complications resulting from earlier surgery. He left a wife and two children.
Look for another Mystery Photo in next Monday’s Observer-Reporter.