DIX -- Kindergarten teacher Chari Mohr and first grade teacher Pam Haack closed their careers in public education.

Mohr closed the book on 40 years of teaching with the end of the 2024-2025 school year.

Mohr said family support. She said everyone in her family just assumed she would be a teacher. 

"Growing up, my family always assumed I would be a teacher. Growing up, we had a very remote ranch that I spent summers in, and I had a younger cousin and they sort of gave me his books and said 'could you teach Dean how to read?' And I think that's where that started," Mohr said. 

In addition to encouragement to help her cousin, she had the influence of family members who were teachers.

"My grandma was a teacher, down at the ranch, a little one-room schoolhouse. That was the family joke that she failed my Uncle Lonnie in the fifth grade," she said.

She said the long career is evidence of the relationships between students and staff.

"It's the students, and the people that you work with. I taught fourth grade my first year right out of college, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. They called me the day school started and said if you can be here by 8, you have the job. Then I taught country school in the Sandhills for awhile, and then I taught in Gordon, Neb. for 20 years and then I got married and moved hear," she said.

She finishes her teaching career with 13 years at Dix.

Pam Haack started assisting teachers and students, and earned her own classroom.

"I've only actually been teaching about 13 years. Chari and I started the same year here. I was here at the Dix school, prior for 17 years as a para. So, with my youngest daughter, I have four children, when my youngest daughter went to school and started kindergarten I was like, 'well, now what am I going to do?'" she said.

Haack said an opening was posted at the school, she applied and was accepted. 

"I think through my para years, and the great teachers I para'd for who just gave me the confidence and the push to like 'you would be a great teacher. You need to get your license,'" she said.

She finished a 30-year career as a para and as a licensed first grade teacher.