Amanda Rasberry-Lovitt
Amanda Rasberry-Lovitt has been a teacher for over a decade; but she didn’t launch right into it after high school. Dublin graduate Rasberry-Lovitt took her time to get to know herself and find out exactly what was right for her.
When she was a senior in high school, Rasberry-Lovitt started working for the Dublin Dr. Pepper plant. By taking a job there, she was carrying on the family legacy. “My grandpa had worked there for 50 years,” she said. “That was his entire career — Bill Kloster was the longest-working employee, and my grandfather was the second-longest.”
Rasberry-Lovitt enjoyed her part-time hours at the plant. “When I first started there, I was the youngest one and so everyone in the office took care of me,” she said. “It was just such a neat environment.”
When she graduated in 2001, Rasberry-Lovitt had a scholarship to study music at Tarleton. “I used to sing locally at the Corner Lot or at church and things like that,” she said. “But after one year [at Tarleton] I realized it was not for me.”
She decided to leave school and take on full-time hours at the Dr. Pepper plant. She worked in the office, then in the museum and soda shop. The longer she stayed, the more projects she took on.
“I loved working in the museum, and when Karen Wright wrote the book about it I helped her do all the research for it,” Rasberry-Lovitt said. “That was really exciting. I spent all this time in courthouses and reading land deeds and looking up marriage records; that part was really fun for me because I’m a history nerd.”
Rasberry-Lovitt stayed in Dublin working for Dr Pepper until 2007, when she was 25 years old.
“I was ready for a change and wanted to do something different, so that brought me up [to Fort Worth],” she said. “I started school and I’ve been here ever since.”
She initially started at Tarrant County College studying commercial design. Then, one day, one of her friends, a teacher, asked Rasberry-Lovitt to help set up her classroom. “I just loved it so much that I went straight home and changed all my coursework.”
Rasberry-Lovitt ended up transferring to the University of Texas at Arlington to get her bachelors and teaching certificate. She graduated with a degree in elementary education in 2011.
Her first job out of college was teaching fifth grade in Hurst, Texas. She soon discovered fifth grade was not her ideal age group, and the next year she tried teaching kindergarten. “I love kindergarten because for a lot of them I’m their first impression of school, because some of them haven’t gone to pre-K,” she said. “I’m the first one to hopefully build a love of learning in them, and kind of teach them what school is about.”
Rasberry-Lovitt also loves seeing her students progress throughout the year. “When they come in they’re not very self-sufficient,” she said. “They can’t button their pants or open a locker or write their name, and they leave me able to navigate the school by themselves, and they are writing stories and reading and adding and subtracting. The growth you see in kindergarten is just so massive and I love that part.”
Throughout more than a decade of teaching, Rasberry-Lovitt has been motivated by seeing her students go on to succeed once they leave her classroom. “I have sixth grade boys who will come back and see me and still want to show me how they’re doing great,” she said. “I’m so proud of them and I just love seeing them grow up and still be successful.”
On top of her teaching, Rasberry-Lovitt is also working on her masters in counseling at Lamar University in Beaumont.
Her interest in counseling was sparked by a discipline program her school adopted. “A couple of years ago my school introduced a discipline philosophy that’s called ‘Conscious Discipline,’ and I loved it,” she said. “I use it in my classroom religiously and I’ve even done trainings on my campus for it. It’s all about social emotional health and teaching kids how to selfregulate and identify their emotions and how to work through them.”
“I just got to a point where I cared more about that than I did teaching them their ABCs,” she said. “Of course there’s value in that, but I want to help them work through all the things that are going on; I work at a title one school, which means that 70-75 percent of our students are on free and reduced lunches, and 50 percent of the kids will change throughout the school year because they move so much. The kids that I work with have a lot of issues going on, and that’s just grown to be what I care more about than academics of school, so that kind of just naturally flowed into becoming a school counselor.”
She’d like to stay on the same campus, if possible. ”I feel really invested at the school,” she said. “Another thing that’s cool about being a kindergarten teacher is that there’s someone I’ve taught at every grade level, so I have all these connections in the school. I’d love to stay there, where I’m already invested in the kids and the families. To be able to help them in a different way would be really cool for me.“
When she’s not working, Rasberry-Lovitt enjoys traveling with her husband Adam and her friends. She also hosts a book club and a dinner club to bring her friends together regularly.
“I’m really big on family too,” she said. “I have a big family, so I go home a lot, and then I have siblings up here near me, and a stepson that lives in Ohio, so we travel there a lot.”
Rasberry-Lovitt’s mother Lou Ann Gifford lives in Comanche with her stepfather Howard. Her father, Wallace Rasberry, lives in Duster between Rising Star and DeLeon.
Rasberry-Lovitt’s advice to Dublin graduates is to go out and explore the world, but to ultimately trust their own judgement when it comes to choosing where to settle down. “There is nothing wrong with staying in your hometown,” she said. “I’d say just go out there for a little bit to see that there’s another world; if you see that that world is not for you, then come back and love your hometown and be in your hometown. I think there’s value in going out, even if it’s just for college, or making sure you travel a lot and see other places; even if the value is that you realize, right here in this town is the place for me.”
Editor’s Note: This column chronicles what Dublin graduates have done since high school. If you have any suggestions for other grads, email publisher@dublincitizen.com.