By Gary Lee Stuber
Mrs. Greenlee is a rare gem at the Clay County High School, CTE school (Career Technical Education School). Technically, she teaches Business Management and Marketing. And through one aspect, one: two-period class, she does this quite unusually.
Earlier this year she “inherited” the old home economics room with the aging kitchen, and she put together a winning idea. She renovated the kitchen and ‘opened for business’ her own kitchen/catering service. Her students now have hands-on experience in operating a business. But there’s more: this year she got a grant to do a Pastries and Baking class. It has come in very handy. She operated the Clay County High School “Tiskelwdah Treats” food trailer at the Clay County Apple Festival, utilizing the growing cooking and baking skills of her students, who not only prepared the food, but also sold it. They prepared a breakfast for teachers before opening day of school. They have even opened the food trailer at special school events and games. And now, a week away from the Clay County High School Graduation, her students will prepare over 1,000 snacks for the event.
She doesn’t just teach business, management, baking, and cooking, she is also teaching something far more necessary. She is teaching old school work values. Hard work, including attention tending to tedious tasks like dishes, laundry and general cleaning. They do team building and students have to produce so much and so quickly depending on each other. She is proud of her first year of baking students who seem to be eager to do what is necessary to make the enterprise work. They learn that shortcuts only lead to failure, and that following directions is both a necessity and a joy for the delicious results they produce. And, like a real business, they self-sustain that business with the fruit their work. Products must be safely created, attractive and delicious. Food sales generate money to acquire more ingredients.
She is just passing down lessons that she learned in life. “With three young children in Big Otter School I said, I can’t sit here at home. What am I going to do now?” She says, “I joined AmeriCorps and with each completed year you get money you can apply toward education. I chose to go into teaching. Specifically I got my degree to teach Marketing and Business Management.” It is not hard to know why. Her father Randy Cantrell was one of the first CTE teachers at Clay County High School. At one point he was even director there. He has long since retired. But during her AmeriCorps days she worked for her father in his office.
Julie was born Julie Cantrell to Mahalia Schoolcraft Cantrell and Randy Cantrell. She is the oldest of three. She has a brother Jeremy and a sister Amanda Chapman. She is the only one to go into teaching. Her three children were from a former marriage. When she and Brian Greenlee married and moved into the home her uncle built on her parents farm in Duck, they became a family of five children: Brianna Greenlee, Joel Walker, Jacy Walker, Jaylin Walker, and Ian Greenlee. All are adult children living now on their own.
Julie started out working AmeriCorps at Big Otter School and ended up working at Clay County High School with her father. At night she took classes in Braxton County in partnership with Glenville State College using the money AmeriCorps gave her for her education. Not only did she complete her degree in teaching from Glenville State College spending her third year on campus, she graduated with a Business Marketing Degree in Education. It has become very useful in her career at Clay County High School. She has many certifications and a Masters in Business Administration.
”As a part of CTE they want us to run a simulated workplace. But as it turns out we are not a simulated workplace; we ARE a workplace.” She says, pointing to racks and racks of pots, pans, and cooking paraphernalia, “So this week we are doing inventory on our business. I have Excel spreadsheets of everything I have, and these labeled racks show where it is stored.”
She is very well organized. “I applied for and got a $5,000 grant to turn this kitchen into less of a residential kitchen to an actual commercial kitchen. All stainless steel. We are getting ready to tear all this down and by the time school opens in the fall we will have our commercial kitchen.”
Speaking of her first year of students, she says, “I don’t know if I got lucky or what. I mean you take for granted they can read and follow a recipe but beyond that I have discovered that all of them perform well under pressure.” She talks examples, “Classes have deadlines, ovens can overheat and overrun, you need time to pivot and clean up messes and still deliver. I have a very large group of girls, and boys, and with a class of that size I cannot be everywhere at the same time and so I give them the power to make some decisions.”
That is indeed how management works. You delegate and depend upon your best workers to get the job done. “Sometimes we will have time later to reflect and say ‘how could we have done this better,’ and everyone contributes.”
She lets her class give her input when it comes to a school catered event. “I let them come up with the ideas and then claim ownership in their own company.” She admits, “I had never made a pumpkin roll until this year, and we had a very successful event, our students and I made some perfect pumpkin rolls.” Her class partnered with the ‘big kitchen’ this year to bring the entire school a one-time event Mexican dinner for the High School lunch. Everybody benefited.
She has a big screen at the head of the classroom portion of the room around which students sit. She demonstrates pulling up some recipes from Pinterest and TikTok.
“One of the greatest things about this class is that I will be sitting at home and my students will text me, ‘look at this,’ or ‘found something you should see.’ My students are very invested too. Sometimes, I just want them to be aware of their surroundings. I teach marketing and I ask, ‘what is on the billboard down the road?’ and most can’t tell me. I tell them, to be creative, you must be aware of the world around you.”
“When I stopped treating this as a classroom and started treating this as a business it really changed my way of thinking. We still have days we need to learn a little bit of stuff, we can call those ‘training days.’ We have done so many things this year. We have made breads, pretzels, pies, puff pastries, custards, made cheese, made butter, made jelly, we made so many things. We have a mobile food trailer but we are trying to get this trailer established as a permanent food truck. So we can take this truck anywhere at random.” She adds, “This year was a learning curve.”
You can see she has big plans for the future. Including perhaps opening a fresh food student operated grocery store somewhere in the county as other states have done so successfully. This would be a way to get fresh fruit and vegetables into the county on a day to day basis.
“This group of students. My first year doing this as a business, has renewed my faith in this generation.” She says proudly, “They are diligent and work hard, work well with other personalities. And if I am a small part of that then I have successfully done my best. I don’t know if I can ever have a class that can rise above this one.”
Clay County businesses please take note: Julie is creating for you the perfect employees for your business with talent, integrity and a hard-work whatever-is-necessary-to-succeed attitude. They would make great summertime interns too.
