Brady Flanigan
Editor
If you’re measuring the seasons by thermometer, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone in Bedford County, Tennessee, who thinks August 1 is the starting gun of fall. Two groups, however, cling to this shared delusion—students and educators. On Monday, July 28, Bedford County Schools held its annual kickoff for the 2025–26 school year at Shelbyville Central High School.
More than 800 teachers descended on the SCHS gymnasium in the early morning haze, before the sun burned through the clouds, gathering to rally for the year ahead. The parking lot was full by 8 a.m. Cars spilled onto the grass; educators in Jeeps with dashboards full of rubber ducks parked on raised islands, beside light poles. Camrys rested atop the blacktop’s direction arrows, blocking thru-traffic. Staff funneled through the main entrance and past registration booths and rows of county sheriffs in green plate carriers until everyone settled in the bleachers. There was a static roar in the gym, as if listening through retired hearing aids.
Just past 8, as the hum diminished, BCS Superintendent Dr. Tammy Garrett and School Board Chairman Michael Cook took the mic and welcomed the crowd. Their remarks opened a full day of programming designed to prepare and energize faculty and staff for the year ahead.
Next came the giveaways. Teachers were directed toward IT support and technology updates—mostly information about where to get help with their new laptops—and then the mic was handed to Assistant Superintendent Tim Harwell, who stepped into the role of emcee.
“Alright, I’ve got to check and see if we have some people in the house!” Harwell called out. “So when I call your school’s name, I want you to stand and get loud! Is everyone ready?”
Memories surfaced: being herded into the gym on a Tuesday morning for a surprise speech from some administrative official whose title meant nothing. Nobody knew why they were there, but everyone was glad to be missing class.
In the SCHS bleachers, the teachers sat in neatly divided clusters, organized by T-shirt color.
“BCLA are you in the house? Give it up for BCLA everybody!” One group stood and cheered.
“Cascade Elementary, where are you?” Scattered whoops.
“Cascade Middle School!”
“Cascade High School, where are you!”
It’s hard to work a crowd with a cheap mic and a fidgety soundboard. The audio would occasionally spike, the mic drifting too close to the speaker, unleashing a sharp ptwang!—the kind of sound that ricochets through the bleachers like a stripper clip ejecting from an M1 Garand.
It wasn’t just the feedback that echoed. The whole production—the choreography, the applause cues, the forced callouts—summoned something older. Like a memory springing loose from dust.
The keynote speaker, Carlos Ojeda Jr., followed. A heavy-set man with a Puerto Rican accent and a preacher’s rhythm. Ojeda spoke about growing up in a scrappy New Jersey household where boys were taught by their fathers to “fight back” instead of “fight forward.” He credited teachers—public school teachers—for helping him rewire his mindset. His career, he said, was their doing. He spoke of his wife’s two-year battle with cancer and how she fought forward too, and lived—after chemo and radiation and a mastectomy and more chemo. His message was less about grit than transformation, less about enduring hardship than changing course. The crowd gave him a standing ovation.
After the keynote, teachers split into workshop sessions, broke for lunch, and returned for three hours of concurrent afternoon training. The event was sponsored by a cross-section of local businesses and institutions—Ascend Federal Credit Union, Musgrave Pencil Company, United Way of South Central Tennessee, and the Shelbyville-Bedford Community Foundation among them. Whether out of civic pride or professional obligation, they helped keep the lights on and the flyers laminated.
But the real work begins next week—after the days of “summer” are over, when the thermometer still reads 100 but the calendar insists fall has begun.
