Educator strives to make children a top priority

By DAN KEGLEY/Staff

If Vince Groseclose has an off switch, he apparently can’t reach it and no one else knows where it is. More likely, he’s just made to be on all the time.
His energy seems inexhaustible and he may be a kind of perpetual motion machine, getting back from those around him the energy and devotion he imparts. Ever upbeat, ever authentic, he’s always in the moment, never watching for the end of his shift.
However he does it, it earned him Smyth County’s Teacher of the Year Award at the close of the school year this spring.
“I try to be very upbeat with all of the children,” he said. “Children need somebody who believes in them and cares about them.”
Teacher of the year for the whole county is an honor, but Groseclose is not keen on being singled out, even for such recognition.
“I have some mixed feelings about it,” he said, that arise from the “competition factor. Competition is not the best word for it. I just say it represents all of the good teachers. It’s a way to recognize our own and promote ourselves.”
Groseclose runs the Learning Center at Marion Intermediate School, a place where students can go for help with academics and the other sometimes hard parts of growing up.
It is a remedial program, he said, that handles acclimation, behavioral and academic needs of students. In 30-minute to hour-long sessions, “I help them with any issues. I also work with whole classes.”
He has been at the intermediate school for seven years. Before that, he spent 10 years at Marion Primary, and 11 years before that at the multi-handicapped program on Look Avenue.
“Change is good. It keeps you going,” Groseclose said. There are often other benefits, he’s found. At the intermediate school, “I get to just work with children and not so much of the paperwork that goes along with special education.”
To see Grosclose at work, it is apparent that the children in his charge are of paramount importance, and the particular child he’s with at the moment may as well be the only youngster in the world.
“When they come to the learning center, I want them to know somebody cares about them. Children are not always top priority in a lot of families. We don’t live in an Ozzie and Harriet world any more.”
Groseclose runs the school store – “nothing over a dollar” and “pencils are very lucrative,” he said – and uses the money in the classroom.
“I try to set up incentive programs,” he said. “You pass a test and you pick a restaurant downtown and I’ll take you to go eat.” There’s some education in that, too, according to Groseclose.
“I take groups to The Restaurant at the [Hungry Mother] lake. Some of the kids have never ordered from a menu.  I use the money from the school store to let children know they’re cared about.”
A Bland County native, Groseclose got his undergraduate and masters degrees from Radford and “was in the last class when it was still a college,” he said. For three summers, he and wife Joanne lived in a tent at Claytor Lake, drove into Radford for classes. “People still remember us as the couple that lived in the tent. That was back when we had no children and we were footloose and fancy free.”
Now daughter Jouette is 22 and a graduate of William and Mary, and son Nick is going into the 10th grade. Through their eyes he sees the school division he’s a part of.
“They’re products of a good school system,” Groseclose said. “Jouette was very prepared for William and Mary. I think we have a good system and people who try. That’s not to say there is not room for improvement.”
They’re also products of a home that supports education, obviously. And their dad isn’t the only honored teacher in the house. Joanne Groseclose was Teacher of the Year “the very first year Smyth County participated in this program,” Groseclose said. And she went on to be chosen Virginia’s Teacher of the Year.”
Dad is now on that path as well, and has already turned in qualifying materials for the regional level. The state teacher of the year goes on to national competition. There again is the word Smyth’s current teacher of the year doesn’t like. Even so he will have to convince judges at each stage that he’s got what it takes to be selected.
“You try to make learning fun or you burn out,” he said, “and children burn out, especially with SOLs [Standards of Learning] and all the pressure to meet goals.”
Having fun, then, is a fuel for Groseclose’s power supply.