By MACKENZEE SIMMS | Staff Writer

MONTEVALLO – With drummers, cheerleaders and pageant queens, Shelby County Schools hosted the IGNITE 2024 event as teachers and school employees from across the county packed into the University of Montevallo’s McChesney Student Activity Center on Monday, Aug. 5.

The Provost and Senior Vice President of Academic Affairs at the University of Montevallo, Dr. Courtney Bentley, welcomed teachers to the event. In addition to being a member of the Shelby County Education Foundation, Bentley is also a mom of a freshman and senior at Montevallo High School.

“Shelby County Schools’ teachers pour into their students, into my students, my kids,” Bentley said. “And while my kids are understandably important to me, you ensure that all students have equitable opportunities to learn. You provide the scaffolding necessary to support every student as they seek to attain the goals they’ve set for themselves, but more importantly, you empower and inspire them to do more. To excel.”

According to the superintendent of Shelby County Schools, Dr. Lewis Brooks, the purpose of IGNITE 2024 is to “ignite” excitement amongst teachers and employees.

“Today, I stand before you not just to speak, but to ignite a spark within each of you,” Brooks said. “We are here to celebrate the boundless potential that resides in every student we encounter this year. We honor each of you for the work that you will do this school year to shape the future and indeed the world around us, together, we will empower and inspire great things to happen in every community and every school.”

The event’s special guest speaker, Damon West, echoed the sentiment that individuals, teachers included, have the power to change the world around them.

West is a college professor and the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of “The Coffee Bean: A Simple Lesson to Create Positive Change.” The book speaks on a lesson West learned after being sentenced to 65 years in a maximum security prison after a meth addiction turned him to a life of burglary.

While being held in the Dallas County Jail, West met another inmate named Muhammad who gave him a lifelong lesson about how to survive prison.

In Muhammad’s analogy, prison is a pot of boiling water. There are three types of people in prison: the carrots, the eggs and the coffee beans. In boiling water, carrots become soft like those that give up hope in prison. Eggs become hardened to the world like some inmates. But when coffee beans are put in boiling water, they make coffee.

“(Muhammad) said everything else is changed by the water of life,” West said. “Carrots are changed by the water. Eggs are going to be changed by the water. But not a coffee bean. He said the coffee bean is going to change the water because it is a change agent.”

The idea of being a coffee bean is to not allow yourself to be changed by adversity, but rather to improve the environment around you with steadfastness in the face of turbulence.

“My call to action to each and every one of you all is the same call to action Muhammad gave me 15 years ago when that prison bus came to Dallas County Jail that day to pick me up to serve my life sentence at Texas Maximum Security Prison,” West said. “You go out there and you be a coffee bean. Be a coffee bean, Shelby County.”