Posted: Jan. 22, 2018 | Source: The Fayette Tribune
Veteran educator Marion G. Tanner issued a press release last week announcing her candidacy for one of the three nonpartisan seats on the Fayette County Board of Education in the May 8 primary election.
Tanner has spent her adult life dedicated to educating children, adults and herself. Her public-school teaching career included four years in Braxton County and 28 years in Fayette County. In Fayette County, she taught first and second grade at Rosedale Elementary and sixth and seventh grade language arts at Fayetteville Middle School.
Tanner says she understands what budget cuts and pitting community against community has done to the school system and the county as a whole, and believes it is time for the county to heal and move forward. She hopes to be a part of the solution to enriching the system’s curriculum, increasing student achievement, and the overall future of the educational system in Fayette County.
Following her retirement in 2004, Tanner continued her learning and teaching experiences by taking adult education classes at Mountain State University and Fayette Institute of Technology. She became a Master Gardener and joined the New River Master Gardener Association through which she enjoyed teaching adults and children about the joys and advantages of gardening.
However, her real passion, she says, is motivating children to read. From her many years in education, she understands that reading is an essential key to educational success. Television, cell phones, and electronic games are real concerns to educators who realize the importance of early and continual interaction with children in developing the love of books and the skills necessary for them to become readers. Since 2011, with the blessing of the county superintendent, Tanner and her Delta Kappa Gamma sisters, have invested many volunteer hours into organizing the Fayette County chapter of Read Aloud. Read Aloud West Virginia is a non-profit organization that strives to encourage the love of reading through a variety of opportunities for children to connect with books. Recruiting and training volunteers to go into classrooms to become live advertisements for reading is one of the main goals of the project. As a result, Fayette County currently has trained readers in all its elementary schools.
In addition to training readers, several other projects to encourage the love of reading have sprung from Fayette County Read Aloud in association with Read Aloud West Virginia. Students in local Read Aloud classrooms have received free books, and two schools received several hundred books for their libraries. In 2016, Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, through which recipients receive a book a month through the mail, became available to children up to 5 years of age who have Fayette County zip codes through the combined efforts of Fayette County Read Aloud and the Fayette County Board of Education. In the most recent project, Fayette County preschool students receive a warm fleece blanket and a new book while their parents participate in a training about the importance of reading to their child in the Snuggle & Read project.
Tanner grew up in Clay County as a coal miner’s daughter. She graduated from Nicholas County High School and Glenville State College. She is a member of Fayetteville Baptist Church where she has served in various capacities over the years. She is also a past president of Delta Kappa Gamma, an International Society of Women Educators. Marion and her husband, Jack, have been married 53 years and are the proud parents of three sons, all graduates of Fayetteville High School and West Virginia University, and grandparents of four precious grandchildren.
“During my teaching career,” she said in her press release, “I was blessed to work with visionary teachers and administrators in our school system, and I see evidence that we have those with vision today — those who are willing to try new techniques to motivate our children to want to learn and be successful. We need to build on the positive and move forward. I, too, have a vision for Fayette County Schools: Working together we can make our education system one of the best in West Virginia!”
