TOP TEACHER

Even Mary Susan Cole is sometimes amazed by all the community service projects that have gotten done through her guidance and/or participation.

These extensive good works earned Cole the 2010 Outstanding Teacher in Community Service award from the Kansas Association for Career and Technical Education, presented during the K-ACTE Summer Conference awards ceremony Aug. 2 in Overland Park.

Cole is a family and consumer sciences teacher at Northeast High School, Arma.

“I started in 2000,” she said. “I came in with the new building.”

Cole is teaching a Work and Family Studies program, parenting,  and her classes include child development, international cuisine, foods management, Food for Today, interior design and life management.

She started a ProStart Culinary Program at Northeast, and has taken culinary teams three times to the Kansas Restaurant Association Hospitality Cup competition. She received National Restaurant Association ProStart Professional Development Scholarships during the summers of 2006 and 2008, which enabled her to attend culinary schools in Chicago and Orlando, Fla. She has also earned management level ServSafe certification.

She’s just as busy, if not more so, outside the classroom. For the past six years she has been an advisor for the Northeast FCCLA Chapter.

“We started out with 10 girls, and now we have 15 to 20,” Cole said. “One year we had 30.”

In 2006 the chapter won the State Community Service award for its work on Red Ribbon Week. The chapter also instituted a community-wide Trunk or Treat event, for which it received the FCCLA State Stop the Violence Award in 2008.

Northeast FCCLA has also supported the Relay for Life, Angels Among Us, Children’s Advocacy Center, Children’s Miracle Network, Mother to Mother Ministry, Wesley House, Special Olympics, Big Brothers Big Sisters of Crawford County and the Salvation Army. The chapter, often in partnership with Jolly Sunflower 4-H Club, adopts a family every Christmas.

The Northeast FCCLA was the first ever Culinary Arts competitors in District J-East FCCLA, and Applied Technology and National Programs in Action teams have also gone to the state level. The chapter has earned Honor Chapter Awards at the silver level in 2005 and 2006.

Cole also served as a community leader with the Jolly Sunflower 4-H Club for 15 years. She continues as food project leader and serves as Crawford County Fair superintendent for the 4-H Fashion Fair and Style Review. She has also served as a clothing judge at the Bourbon County Fair, Fort Scott, and served on the Crawford County Extension Board and the FACS Program Development Committee.

She is a member of Alpha Kappa Chapter, Phi Tau Omega sorority, which has many philanthropic projects and contributes to numerous local charities.

Cole has served for several years on the Tobacco Use Prevention Coalition with the Crawford County Health Department. She also served on the advisory board of the Straight Talk Peer Education Team, and helped carry out and write chronic disease grants.

Her husband, Steve Cole, is a pastor, and she has been very active in the Arma and Girard United Methodist Churches. In Arma she was a Sunday school and Vacation Bible School teacher and director, and a member of the Community Cantata group, as well as a district officer for the United Methodist Women.

In Girard she serves on the Christian Education Committee and is Sunday school chairman, as well as a co-director of the Community Vacation Bible School, held in conjunction with the Disciples of Christ, Presbyterian and Baptist Churches.

“I also belong to PEO in Girard, and have served as chaplain for two years,” Cole said.

She’s also found time to be a mother. Son Benjamin, a ProStart National Program Completer, is a junior theater major at Baker University. Daughter Danielle has a bachelor of science in nursing from Pittsburg State University and is an RN at Via Christi Hospital. She is married to Andrew Smith, and the couple had a child in July.

Community service, Cole said, “is kind of my thing.”

But she stressed that she doesn’t do it alone.

“I can set it up, and other people do the work,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to show my appreciation to the Northeast staff, administration, students and parents who have been so supportive of everything. I look back over the years at some of the things I’ve done, and I can’t believe we did that.”