For the Love of Students
Story by Melanie Jones
When Bill Giles walks the halls of Van High School, students greet him with smiles and hugs. He dresses like they do—his wardrobe includes a colorful tie-dyed jacket—speaks their language and always has an encouraging word. His love for the students is clear, as is their love for him.
The age gap is also obvious. Now 87, Bill has worked at the high school for 65 years. He joined the staff as a teacher during President Dwight Eisenhower’s administration and has worked for every Van Independent School District superintendent. He has no plans to stop anytime soon.
“The thing that keeps me coming back to Van High School every year is that I still love what I do, and I still enjoy what I do,” he says in a video the school district produced. “It has never felt like I am coming to work. It’s always felt like I’m coming to something that I love. I guess maybe I don’t see age as a number. I see it as knowledge, and I think I still have the knowledge of what I’m doing.”
Bill’s longevity at the school means he’s on his fourth generation of students. When a student comes in today, Bill often finds he taught their brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, parents and even grandparents. He enjoys hearing from former students who graduated in his first or second year who still recognize him and talk about how much he meant to them.
He says it’s always meaningful to help students through academic or health struggles or anything else that’s affecting them. “They always say in counseling, basically, if you help one student a year, you’ve been successful. Now, I don’t think that’s the truth,” he says. “I hope I help more than one student a year. But when you have that student who, when they leave your office you feel like made some sort of progress or success that they made it through the day— whether with mental health problems or academics, I feel like it’s been a great day for me as well as for them.”
Caring for the kids is the most important part of his job. “The thing that I’m most proud of over the past years that I’ve been at Van High School is I have been a part of so many students’ lives—changing their lives, helping them find success and helping them love themselves well,” he says.
To Bill, working with teens is more than a career. It’s a blessing. “I just want my legacy in Van High School to be that it was never really a job for me, it was truly something that God blessed me with—the love for all of my kids,” he says. “I want my legacy to be that there was never a student who graduated that I didn’t care for.”