El Dorado, Kan. - Over the last 28 years, El Dorado Middle School language arts teacher Margo Funk hopes she’s been able to impart this bit of wisdom to her students: “Push yourself to go as far as you can; never just settle. In life, you don’t know what’s going to come your way or what opportunities are going to be available to you. If you’ve done your best to prepare yourself for that situation, then you’re better prepared to take advantage of those opportunities.” At the end of this school year, Funk will be exiting the El Dorado school district in favor of retirement. However, she won’t be stepping away from children for good. She’s been offered an opportunity to “expand and grow” as the reading specialist for Magdalen Catholic School in Wichita. “I’m going back to the young ones,” Funk said. “The gratification is a lot faster at that level. When you have a student at the beginning of the year who can’t recognize letters and at the end of the year, they can actually read, that’s pretty amazing.” Funk has spent the last 18 years at EMS, though her career in USD 490 began teaching second grade at Skelly Elementary for seven years. She also taught kindergarten at Lincoln for three years and acted as the district’s Title I administrator for five years. “It’s very bittersweet for me,” she said. “You don’t work in a district for 28 years and just shut the door and walk away without having some real mixed feelings.” Funk went to Wichita North High School and then college at Wichita State University before continuing her education at the University of Kansas. She just finished her master’s degree from Emporia State recently. Originally in pursuit of a nursing degree, Funk stumbled on a chemistry course and began to have second thoughts. “I kind of stumbled into teaching, almost accidentally,” Funk said. “Once I got into it, I just really enjoyed it." “Every day is different; there’s never two days that are the same. I like to think that I am a life-long learner. I’m always searching for a new and different situation.” Though she never taught her own two sons, Evan and Ethan (who graduated from El Dorado High in 1998 and 2002 respectively), Funk has seen many students pass through her classroom. “I’ve now had the opportunity to teach the children of some of my second grade students that I had when I started teaching in El Dorado,” Funk said. “Just the satisfaction of knowing that maybe I contributed to their lives a little or just had a small impact.” She said one of her challenges over the years has been reaching students who may not have the drive to succeed. “You want to reach every student and you want to try to impact every student; sometimes you do, sometimes you don’t,” Funk said. “There’s always that disappointment of some student that comes through and you think, ‘Gee, if I only could have done this or that.’” In reflecting on the evolution of her profession over the last few years, she said, “The No Child Left Behind legislation has probably changed it as much as anything that I’ve seen,” though not necessarily in a negative way. “It has certainly made an issue out of students that were not being reached for many, many years,” she said. “Now schools are being put in a situation where they no longer have that option. There is value in leaving no child behind. “By that same token, it has certainly narrowed the curriculum. I don’t know that it has taken away the creativity, but it has certainly made the focus much narrower. “Because the focus is on the reading and the math and the science and the social studies, the electives – which for some students may be a place where they can really excel – if they struggle in those other subjects, sometimes they don’t get the opportunity to spend as much time in those elective classes.”