Jones County students, their parents, friends, the community and family. It doesn’t matter to Leslie Poythress. Whether it’s on the job or otherwise, she has been there her entire adult life to help whoever may need it.
Poythress, a 30-year veteran of the Jones County school system and now in the Board of Education office, is retiring June 30 at the age of 52, in part due to the health of her husband, Michael.
“He has multiple sclerosis. He retired on disability,” she shared last week. “He has great days, and then he has not so great days. And I want to make sure we’re living our life where we take advantage of those great days.”
That desire to try to make it better isn’t just beginning. In 1995, and for almost 25 years thereafter, Poythress was a key member of a local fundraiser.
She has supported other community projects as well.
The former Leslie Steelman met Michael Poythress when she was 16 and dated him on and off through school. They married in 1995.
“I graduated (from college) in 1995, got married April 1, and started teaching in August. An eventful year!”
The couple has two sons, Avery and Tyler. Avery is 25, works with Central Georgia Railroad, and has two children, while Tyler is 21 and a senior at ABAC in Tifton.
Moving onward, upward, surviving COVID
Poythress obtained her Bachelor’s Degree in Early Childhood Education and Master’s and Specialist Degree in Educational Leadership from Georgia College in Milledgeville.
“I planned on going to UGA after two years and never made it,” she confessed. “I enjoyed Milledgeville and the college experience there.”
Poythress easily remembers her first position with the Jones County schools.
“I started at Gray Elementary with Dianna Blizzard as a third grade teacher. Her elementary school had 1,440 children. We were huge.”
Poythress basically moved ‘up the ladder’ in the school system. Her posts included teacher and Parent Coordinator at Gray Elementary, and Assistant Principal at Mattie Wells before taking one year off for family reasons.
She returned to Gray Elementary as a teacher for two years and one year as teacher/assistant principal before serving as assistant principal there for four years. Poythress was principal at Gray Elementary for eight years, then moved to Clifton Ridge Middle School in 2019 as principal for two years. That was at the start of COVID.
“At the beginning of the year, everything was rocking right along, and then COVID hit after Christmas. And we sent kids home in March. We literally put kids on a bus one day in March and told them we didn’t know when they were coming back.”
Poythress termed COVID as ‘challenging.’
“I had been in the county a long time and watched teachers teach hard and administrators work hard and everybody support one another, but it was a new level of support.”
“We started the beginning of distance learning where we were trying to work with kids at home while we were at our homes, and that was different. But,” she continued, “teachers met the challenge, parents met the challenge. But it wasn’t easy for anybody. It was frightening, but we did it.”
Helping through new position
For the past five years, Poythress, who in 2005 was named Jones County’s first Teacher of the Year, has been the executive director of family engagement and alternative programs.
The focus of her department is to help provide students and families with necessities, Poythress explained.
“Students need food. We work to get them food. If power goes out, if they don’t have water, we try to find resources. We work the Jones County Family Connection very closely just to make sure students have what they need so that they can learn, because if they’re not safe and they aren’t fed, then it’s hard for them to learn.”
The department director said family engagement coordinators Shelly Edwards and Shelby Henderson are the ‘boots on the ground’ in the system. “They lead FACE (family and community engagement) teams at the school level,” she pointed out. “We work with families to try to find wraparound services.”
Poythress cited the recent extremely cold weather, when it became evident there were students who needed warmer clothes.
“We got the community together. We had folks from all across the community, churches and businesses, bringing coats up to the board office so that students could have jackets if they needed them. So our team led that, along with the FACE teams at the school level.”
She estimated that at least 500 coats were provided for students in need.
Another project Poythress and her staff have taken part in is Jesus Helping Hands, sponsored by several churches, which provides meals for students on the weekends.
“Parents have to fill out an application, a very easy process,” she explained. “But if anybody does need food for their children, they get a bag on a Friday that has enough like it’s a long weekend. It’s enough breakfast and lunch and dinner for the weekend so that they don’t go hungry over the weekend. That’s completely from the support of the community.
“They started it two years ago in full force, and now they’re serving close to 200 children in the school system.”
Poythress also works with the Virtual Academy, which provides students under certain circumstances the opportunity to take classes from home. Per state law, she said, the virtual program must be in place for grades three through 12.
“They do their learning from home. At the high school level, it may look different,” she said. “We have some students that need just a couple of classes. They may be doing college work and then need the high school classes, so we support that.”
Poythress oversees the Achievement Academy — the alternative school — that works with students who may have had discipline issues or similar problems in regular school classes.
“A lot of our kids are what I call ‘one and done’. They just made a mistake, and so we try to get them through that mistake. Hopefully,” she said, “when they leave us, they’re even better off academically, socially and emotionally than when they came to us.”
Contributing off the job
Poythress hasn’t restricted her support for students and the community to her position in the school system. She was co-chair for years with Jarrell Greene of the local Relay For Life annual event, which raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in Jones County for the American Cancer Society.
“My husband and I walked our first Relay for Life in 1995, and up until right before COVID, we walked every year. When Jarrell couldn’t be chair anymore, I took over for a little while with that and worked with an amazing team across the county: businesses, organizations, churches that just joined forces to try to make a difference and raise money for the American Cancer Society.”
Poythress explained that the fundraising went on throughout the year, so many people were involved. “At its height, just about everybody within the community supported Relay. If you weren’t on a team, you at least gave money.”
Poythress said her family has been touched by cancer multiple times, and the night of the actual relay each year is special.
“It has a little more meaning when you start walking around and seeing all the luminaries, and your family members are on the bags, whether it’s in memory of or in honor of.”
Poythress said COVID led to the end of Relay For Life, but she and a lot of others in the school system support Jay’s Hope, a nonprofit organization started by a mother who lost a son to cancer.
“A lot of us support Jay’s Hope because those are local children and families that have been impacted by cancer,” she commented.
Upcoming retirement; leaving a legacy
The Poythress family has enjoyed camping for years, and the soon-to-beretiree plans to continue that. They have gone from tent camping to using campers and going to parks. Soon, however, Poythress indicated, that will change.
“We’re about to get into boon-docking now that we’re moving into retirement. We’re getting everything equipped for that, where we just kind of go off road and camp without all the amenities of a park.” That means no electricity and no provisions, such as water, she explained.
The family has enjoyed camping on the river and on Life Island near Savannah. Poythress said she grew up on the lake, going back and forth to Lake Sinclair, where her father still lives. “So we can visit and enjoy all the lake has to offer.”
Poythress believes Jones County has the best school system around, and she is grateful she has had the opportunity to be a part of it.
“I’ve been blessed with great mentors through the years. Dianna Blizzard hired me; Cecil Patterson, Chuck Gibson; these are folks who have put time into me as a leader. And, I do hope I leave that as a part of my legacy, that I’ve helped to build some leaders through classroom and administration. And hope to continue that; It’ll just look different than it does now.”
