Theresa Foster Jones

I contribute my success to God, because I've been through so many different things. Just to give you an example, in 2021, I ended up going to the hospital because I have Crohn's disease, and I had to get my colon removed. I had a bag for 18 months, and I had to go through a lot of rehab to get myself back together. For me to be still doing what I'm doing right now is totally from God. There's no way I couldn't have done that by myself. It took me two and a half, three years to get back to where I am today, but in the meantime, I still was working with children, I still was going to work every day, because I felt like this is bigger than me. I have to contribute something, give something back to education, because education made me. Every day I wake up, I just be like, I can't believe it. I tell my husband every day, I can't believe it.

The best career advice I received was from my advisor in undergrad. When I first started out in college, I wasn't focused, I was young, just didn't know, and I ended up not passing two of my classes. But the undergrad teacher took me by my hand and was like, listen, if you're gonna do this thing, you're gonna need to stay focused. You need to say this is the main thing that you want in your life. I was very discouraged during that time, being a young person, just not knowing, and I hadn't had anybody before me that had done this, because I'm the only person in my family that's a teacher. Nobody else had done anything like this, so it was kind of like me putting myself on my own bootstraps to get going, because nobody was able to tell me which way to go.

My advice would be to just hook onto a leader, a pioneer in education, because they will be able to give you the pathway and answer the many questions that you need. A lot of times, we suffer from lack of knowledge, and we're scared to ask. Education is a great and wonderful field because education has fed me my whole life. The best thing to do is go online and make sure that you're hooking up with somebody that's in the education field, and they can give you some proper guidance. Ask as many questions. I think it would have been better off if I asked more questions. I think I would have got through way more quicker than I did. When I got to Las Vegas, I didn't know anybody from education, so I had to kind of find my way. Be in the presence of people with education, because otherwise you're not gonna get what you need.

The biggest challenge is just getting past the initial interview, because I'm a Black woman, and sometimes that's intimidating for others. I know it sounds weird, but where I live in Las Vegas, I feel like people are missing out on what I can offer by just my persona, just from when they see me. Like, oh, she's a big black woman, that's probably why, you know, whatever the case is. I think people missed out on the opportunity of having me come into their school and make a difference because of what they first saw. I'm not gonna say I missed out, I'm gonna say they missed out on the opportunity.

My values are my family, to make sure that my family is in the right frame of mind, making sure they're healthy, holy, and have peace. Professionally, the value that I want to uphold is just to make sure that I'm helping somebody. That's the main thing. If I'm gonna leave a legacy, that's the thing that I want to leave behind, is that Miss Teresa Jones helps somebody. I want to pull those people up behind me as well, because I didn't have that. I guess I'm Gen X, so we are the last people that really help somebody pull up. Professionally, I just want to make sure that kids are cared for, like young adults. They need to be nurtured. When you get them out of high school, at 18, you're just lost, because I just remember when I was 18, I was lost. I didn't know what to do. I just want to be in that moment, like, just before they're gonna make that big mistake, like, wait a minute, we can do it like this.