Second Wind
The next Fall, Gina went to work teaching school with the Jasper City School system. The bulk of her career was spent at Maddox Middle School, with some at Walker High School. “I taught gifted, computer, English, social studies and science, and I worked in the library,” she says. “I loved every minute I taught school.” But as her twenty-fifth year approached and the spectre of retirement loomed, so did the opportunity of new and exciting adventures.Gina was intrigued. “I taught right through, had babies, kept working, and so I ended up being forty-seven years old and had built up twenty-five years in state retirement,” she says. “I’ve always worked, I like working, so I thought I might retire and start a second career, try something new.” Her husband Carey had already retired with twenty-five years in law enforcement and embarked on a successful new career with Alabama Power.Deciding to weigh her options, Gina submitted online resumes’ to test the waters. One day she got a bite. “I was offered a job at the same ALFA office where my own policy had been for years,” she says. The clincher came when her friend Dr. Robert Sparkman made her an offer. “He said, ‘I would give it a try, and if you hate it, I will hire you back,’” she says. “I gave it a try and ended up loving it.”The change wasn’t easy at first. “Kids would come up to me the first year and say ‘Why did you leave? I thought you loved teaching?’ I loved it. But I might like something else too.”There was also the inevitable learning curve. “Anybody could ask me about anything in the school system and I knew the answer,” Gina says. I went from knowing almost everything to being as green as they come.”To learn all she could about her new career, Gina completed two different professional designations with The American College that involved taking eight courses on insurance and personal finance topics. "Now when the phone rings or someone asks me an insurance question in Walmart, I know the answer and can offer advice to my friends and clients,” she says.Although the insurance business and teaching are different fields, Gina says they both require the same skills. “The skills are: how to communicate, how to motivate others, and how to help map out a plan for others,” she says. “Meeting a person, seeing where they are, finding out where they want to go, and helping them get there.”Gina and Carey have now been married twenty-eight years and have two children. Their son, C.H., twenty-three, graduated from Samford University and is an ALFA agent in Birmingham. Their daughter, Pollyann, twenty-one, just graduated from Mississippi College and has accepted a teaching position at Sumner Hill. Her husband Ross also teaches school.The Scruggs love traveling to places like New York, Chicago, Hawaii, and the Grand Tetons, but they always enjoy coming back home. “We love it here,” Gina says. “We’re in Jasper by choice. If you had told me when I was sixteen that I would be living in Jasper, I would have said ‘kill me now’, but I got out of college, came back here and my perspective totally changed. I realized what all we have here.”
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