COLUMBUS – Polk County High School English teacher Donna Everett, known simply as “E” to many of her former students, has made a name for herself in the school district over the last 12 years of her teaching career. 

She has also just returned from a two-year teaching stint in Switzerland for the start

of the current school year. Everett is now an English III and English III Honors teacher.

Teaching English at Switzerland’s Leysin American boarding school at the ninth and 10th grade levels was a great experience, she relates.

“I was teaching at the Leysin American School and we are two hours east of Geneva,” Everett said. “The school is a small, private boarding school and teaches grades eight through 12 and offers a U.S. diploma and an international baccalaureate diploma. We had 350 students in 60 different nationalities, and the fact that it is a boarding school meant the students lived there.”

Traditionally, Polk County High School students attend classes from 8 a.m. until 3 p.m. and go home for a three-month summer break in between school years. Leysin is a year-round school and operates on a schedule that has students going to different sets of classes each day.

“Teachers had apartments and students had dormitory rooms, so you saw your students 24/7,” Everett explained. “That was a double-edged sword for me. It was wonderful, for instance, if you had a student who was struggling with a paper or needed a little extra help on an assignment or project, it was so easy for that student to come to you, or for you to find a place on campus to meet. Conversely, seeing the students in situations like, for instance, if they got too loud in the dorm. Sometimes you began to feel like you were always the disciplinarian.”

Extracurricular activities such as rowing, swimming, yoga, soccer and horseback riding were mandatory requirements for students after school. During the winter, students would be allowed to leave school at noon on Tuesdays and Thursdays in order to attend ski and snowboarding classes on the slopes.

“We even had a theater program with a wonderful theater director Alan Babcock,” Everett explained. “He’s worked on and off Broadway and was just absolutely brilliant and I assisted him with the after school program. I learned as much as the kids from him and it was just such a joy to work with someone of his professional caliber.”

Everett said she did get to direct Stephen Gregg’s “This is a Test,” a short comedic play about a student under the pressure of taking a future-predicting test that includes an essay question in Chinese. Everett said the Chinese portion of the one-act play is not easy to reproduce on stage and she’s had to fake the Chinese-spoken lines in her previous adaptations of the production.

“That was really interesting because you’re dealing with students from over 60 different nationalities and so many of them still have fairly significant accents when they speak. Even though their English is fluent, their articulation, whether it’s a Spanish or a Russian accent, it’s really interesting to have all of these accents going on when you’re in a play,” Everett explained. “It can be difficult to get the students to slow down to be understood by the general audience, but it was a lot of fun. At one point, the students begin speaking in Chinese. Well, not a problem for us, because we had native Chinese speakers who could teach the other kids to learn the proper way of saying the Chinese.”

Bringing Charles Schulz’s “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown,” which Everett called a “true piece of Americana,” to an international school was both challenging and a lot of fun.

“It was a lot of fun showing them the comic strips, working with them. Teaching that little bit of Americana to these foreign students was a ball too,” Everett said.

Aside from being in a different school in a different country in central Europe, Everett said immersing herself in the culture of Switzerland was interesting, especially when it comes to how the nation deals with snow.

“It is just gorgeous. We were in an area known as the ‘pre-Alps’ at about 5,600 feet,” Everett said. “We would get snow and you know what’s interesting is here, if a few flakes drop, everything stops and becomes frozen. Well, in Switzerland, nothing stops. My apartment was 9/10 of a mile from the classroom, so I would have to walk downhill on a zig-zag pattern in the snow at 6 a.m. when it was still dark to get to class. And, you hear the phrase ‘Swiss time is on time,’ and that’s absolutely true. I only experienced one late train in two years, and it was late by seven minutes because a cow was on the track.”

Everett said being two hours east of Geneva also meant she could inexpensively travel around Europe, as Geneva serves as a central hub if tourists want to travel to places like Vienna or Brussels.

“Geneva was a two hour train ride from my village and we would go shopping there,” Everett said. “Leysin is where the Olympics headquarters is with an Olympics museum that’s just fabulous. For those two years, Geneva was central. An hour flight, you’re in Barcelona. An hour and a half, you’re in London. An hour and you’re in Brussels. Another hour, Vienna. It’s the getting there to Europe that’s expensive, but it really is incredibly affordable once you’re there.”

Being back in Polk County, though, is what Everett looks forward to in her first year returning to PCHS and she said there’s nothing like it to her. She added that being a teacher of students during their junior year is exciting because she gets to prepare them to tackle anything during their senior year.

“I will tell you, I could not be happier to be home, having taught here for 12 years,” Everett said. “I will tell you, on the first day, I was standing in the hallway listening to students talk and I thought to myself, ‘Oh my gosh, there’s so much English spoken in these hallways.’ And I thought, ‘Well, duh, that’s because you’re back in the U.S.’ I consider Polk County High School my home, and I am beyond blessed to have the rare opportunity to come back. Fortune smiled on me.”