Lauderdale: Raising expectations brings Beaufort County educator full circle

Etta Mann stepped into a different world when she came to teach at the Penn School on St. Helena Island in 1949.

The Gullah people spoke in almost a foreign tongue, and the island seemed dark, barren and isolated.

The young lady who was then Etta Nickpeay knew right off that she was a "cum yah" but she felt welcomed.

She was brought up on a farm, but it was different in the Eastover community near Columbia. It was different at Booker T. Washington High School in Columbia, and in Raleigh, N.C., where she graduated from St. Augustine College.

But Mann always knew she wanted to be a teacher and Jonathan Francis Sr. was the first principal to give her a job, sight unseen. She came from a family of teachers. Her mother was her fourth-grade teacher and was especially demanding on young Etta.

"She expected so much more of me," Mann recalled this week.

On Saturday night, the Penn Center honored Mann for raising expectations in the Lowcountry. Mann was inducted into the Penn Center's 1862 Circle along with the Beaufort-Jasper-Hampton Comprehensive Health Services and Richard W. Riley, the two-term governor of South Carolina and former U.S. Secretary of Education.

More than half the people at the banquet at the Sonesta Resort on Hilton Head Island came to cheer on Mann, a teacher and guidance counselor in the Beaufort County public schools for 38 years.

Former students like retired 9th Circuit Court Judge Daniel E. Martin Sr. of Charleston came to say thanks. He grew up in Bluffton and was educated at Penn, which was founded in 1862 to educate freedmen.

Mann was here for all the planning that went into the first state-run public school on St. Helena. Teachers were familiar with every home.

"They were very caring," she said. "They wanted their children to get an education."

But often the greatest goal was to finish high school.

"Now I think you would find very few homes on St. Helena where somebody has not gone to college," Mann said.

Mann earned a master's degree from Indiana University and married a U.S. Marine Corps master sergeant.

She was on the front lines when the federal government forced integration of the schools of Beaufort County, with St. Helena High, Robert Smalls High and Beaufort High merging into a single school.

"Oh, Lord have mercy," is one way Mann describes the tense time when it seemed students, parents and even teachers would rather be somewhere else.

"It took a little time, but we eventually got it back together," she said.

Mann thinks that when people finally talked to each other, they found out they weren't really all that different.

She marvels at the facilities and the wide array of course offerings today's students have. They can even leave high school with college credits.

"I think schools are on the go," Mann said. "I don't care how well you do something, you'll always have complainers."

Penn Center was inundated with letters from Mann's former students telling how she inspired them. Mann said the award was not about her, but those students she found in such a different world.

Follow columnist and senior editor David Lauderdale at twitter.com/ThatsLauderdale and facebook.com/david.lauderdale.16.

This story was originally published April 28, 2015 at 5:49 PM with the headline "Lauderdale: Raising expectations brings Beaufort County educator full circle."