Vienna — VIENNA – Nearly 50 years after he came to Dooly County as a teacher, Leon Echols is still in the classroom, and he continues to get just as excited about teaching as he did in those early years.

Echols has tried to retire, but he stayed away only two and a half years, and during those years, he remained a Board of Education employee in technology support. “I helped teachers who weren’t as familiar with computers,” he said.

Now, he says he works from year to year, and he has signed a contract for one more year. “I think it may be time for me to give it up,” he says, but he hasn’t made that decision yet.

Echols, an Alabama native who was working there for Reynolds Aluminum, was hired as an industrial arts teacher in 1963 by Dr. Napoleon Williams. “I wanted to teach. He told me to bring my wife, and he’d also find a teaching job for her.”

The rest is history. Rachel Echols retired as a teacher in the Dooly County School System, and neither of them ever worked anywhere else.

Originally, Echols taught woodworking, electricity, electronics, metal working and silk screen and heat press printing in the industrial arts curriculum.

In 1994, however, the state changed the area to Technology Education with an emphasis on graphic arts. Dooly County Schools developed a lab that included about 12-14 modules. Only two students worked in any one area, so Echols had as many as 12 different activities going on in the same classroom.

Some of the areas they studied included flight simulation, computer graphics, desktop publishing, nautical engineering, meterology, millwork, robotics and TV production and broadcasting.

The students rotated modules every 15 days. That classroom setting was quite challenging for Echols since his students were doing so many different things.

Before the turn of the century, the state had decided the modular program was not the best method for teaching computer technology. Echols’ students continue to use the same lab and equipment, but now the entire class studies the same thing at the same time, and the class is called “foundations of engineering.”

To prepare for all these changes his classrooms went through, Echols had to spend an inordinate amount of time going to school himself. He spent three summers at the University of Georgia undergoing technology training. Another three summers, he studied construction, manufacturing and industrial management at Georgia Southern University.

He completed two courses in “teaching technology” at Auburn University, and studied the process of vocational education at Valdosta State University. Echols obtained technical support training at Columbus State University, and learned computer networking at South Georgia Technical College.

Every time there was a new technological advance, he had to learn about it himself before he could teach it, but he loved it. “It’s been a lot of fun doing all these things,” he says. It has been particularly rewarding for him to see that “lightbulb” of understanding come on in his students’ eyes.

Echols is proud of many of his former students who have gone on to pursue engineering, computer technology and other similar careers. One of those students has been teaching drafting at South Georgia Tech almost long enough to retire himself.

It’s funny, Echols said, that the students who seem the least likely to go into an engineering field when they are in high school, will wind up using the very skills they learned in his classes for much of their adult lives.

He recalls one student who got frustrated in his class and declared he would never use this “junk.” After a short stint in the U. S. Navy, that student came back to see Echols and asked him to help him get into the drafting program at South Georgia Tech. “I couldn’t help reminding him that he had once thought this was ‘junk,’” he laughed.

One of the most important things he’s learned in almost 48 years of teaching, Echols says, is that students “don’t care how much you know. They want to know how much you care.”

He has developed close personal relationships with many of his students, and those are really precious to him.

Outside of school, Echols enjoys “piddling around with his antique car and dove hunting.” He says he used to be much more involved in community activities, but he has slowed down somewhat and now spends more time with his wife who has some health issues.

The Echols have two children and two grandchildren. Their son is an attorney, and after a number of years in law enforcement, their daughter has recently completed her practical nursing degree and now will enter that field of work.

Because of her work in the prison system, “we spent some sleepless nights worrying about her, so we’re glad she has gotten out of that,” Echols said.

Their granddaughter is an actress, and their grandson, a senior at Morehouse University is studying to be a foreign language translator.