Meet Diane Wooten

Diane Wooten

JUNE 2, 2014 – Diane Wooten started first grade on Sept. 3, 1963. That was also the first day of school for the newly consolidated Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools.

These days, Wooten is a second-grade teacher assistant at Speas Elementary School. In those days, her last name was Shaw and she lived in a trailer park off East Polo Road. On that first day of school, she and the other students who lived there walked down to Creed’s Store and waited for the bus. “I was excited,” she said.

At first, she struggled a bit with reading because she had trouble seeing the words. She knew that something wasn’t right about her vision. She told someone, and the school nurse took her to get her eyes checked. “I got glasses and starting catching up on reading, bang, bang, bang.”

That was good because she liked reading a lot. She liked her first grade teacher a lot, too. Her name was Mrs. Hairston. “I probably didn’t ever know her first name,” Wooten said. “She was old when I had her. She was a real loving grandmotherly type.”

She liked that Mrs. Hairston let her help out in the classroom. Mrs. Hairston soon stopped asking her to staple papers, though. “She wouldn’t let me staple papers after the second time I stapled my finger.”

After first grade, Wooten and her parents, James and Estelle Shaw, and younger brother, Doug, moved and Wooten went to Rural Hall for grades two through six. In the sixth grade, she was assigned to a classroom in a trailer behind the school. On the first day of school, the principal failed to turn on the switch to activate the public address system in their trailer. “We didn’t get the announcement about buses,” she said.

When the principal discovered what had happened, he took all the students home, a carload at a time. 

After Rural Hall, it was on to Northwest for two years. She started eighth grade in 1971, the year the school system put into place a new attendance plan and started busing students to bring about full integration. “I went to Hanes,” she said.

In one sense, she said, she didn’t notice a lot of difference because Northwest had already been pretty well integrated. Having to ride the bus a lot farther was different, and she didn’t like that a lot of her friends from Northwest had been assigned to other schools. She missed them. “I remember I was disappointed because I was away from a lot of friends.”

For her final two years, she went to North Forsyth High School. In retrospect, she doesn’t think she had the chance to make the connections that students who go to a high school for four years have.

All in all, though, her experience with Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools was good. In high school, she got to take a custom sewing class and, in every grade, her love of reading and math was encouraged.

After graduating from North Forsyth in 1975, she entered a nursing program. She soon decided that nursing wasn’t her cup of tea, though, and switched to what was then called “electronic data processing” at Forsyth Technical Community College. “Way back in the Dark Ages of computers,” she said.

She liked that just fine, and worked in that field until she and her husband – Stephen – whom she had met at Forsyth Tech, had their first son, James. Another son, Thomas, followed, and she stayed home with them. When Thomas became a student at Old Town Elementary School, she started volunteering there. She did such things as help with word problems.

One day, Thomas’ fourth-grade teacher asked whether she had ever considered becoming a substitute teacher. She liked the idea and began substituting at the beginning of the 1993-94 school year. In 1996, the Downtown School hired her as a teaching assistant. During that time, she began working on earning her teaching certification, first through a program at Winston-Salem State University and then through High Point University’s satellite campus in Winston-Salem. “I got my teaching degree.”

She went to Speas as a fourth-grade teacher. After a year, she chose to become a teacher assistant again. “I am happy what I am doing – having a blast really without all the stress of teaching, testing, all that stuff.”  

Wooten rotates among the three second-grade classes at Speas. Her granddaughter, Sara Wooten, is in one of the classes.

What the school system gives her now is the chance to be with lots of children every day. “I love being with the kids,” Wooten said.