2026 Legacy NAFC Royal Court

A message from Stephanie Lone (FC '95):

I didn't set out to be a teacher. I was good at science, so everyone around me encouraged me to be a doctor. I volunteered in doctors' offices and hospitals in college and realized pretty quickly it wasn't for me. Then, right after I graduated, I was asked to fill in for a teacher at New Albany on maternity leave. I figured it was temporary, just until she came back. She never did, and neither did I. All these years later, I'm in my fourth year at Floyd Central after many years at New Albany, teaching Anatomy and Physiology and Human Body Systems, and serving as department head.

I think about my own time at Floyd Central a lot, actually. By the time I got to college, I'd already taken anatomy, microbiology, two levels of biology, and zoology. My first year was practically a review, while classmates who'd come from smaller schools were drowning because their high school never had the chance to offer them all of that. That's the difference a strong school makes, and it's the difference I get to hand my students every single day, if we have what we need to do it.

That's really the whole thing for me. I've got a ninth grader and an eleventh grader walking these halls right now, so I see these grants working for my own kids as much as I do for the students in my classroom. Every year I watch grants from this Foundation turn into things my classroom couldn't function without: charging stations for probes we'd otherwise never be able to use, clay and mats so my students can build a working model of the human body one piece at a time.

And on a personal note, both of my kids grew up on Imagination Library books. When ours stopped coming in the mail, I was actually sad about it. We looked forward to that.

I'll be honest, asking people for money does not come naturally to me. But I keep coming back to one thing: this Foundation's whole mission is to help me do my job. So how could I not support that?

That's my ask. Whatever you can give between now and December 11th goes straight back into classrooms like mine.