If you ask Becky Partain where she learned the value of hard work, she won’t point to a classroom or a corporate office—she’ll point to the racetrack where she grew up.

Her parents trained and raised horses, coming to this area to what was then the Premier Race Track in Oklahoma. Long before she was shaping lives at Vian Public Schools, she spent her time after school and weekends mucking stalls, brushing horses and learning life lessons at what once used to be one of the state’s busiest race tracks.

Her parents ran horses while she attended school and even continued after she left for a while. But around the late 1990s they got out of the business, even though they’ve always been a horse and livestock family. “It was a big culture shock when I moved here from Bartlesville,” Partain said. “There were a lot of executives there and everyone had more of an engineer mentality. Here, it’s more blue collar but the racetrack was a good place to grow up. I made a lot of friends there and I learned how to work. I cleaned a lot of stalls, ponied, and brushed a lot of horses. It was good and I met all kinds of people there. There was a lot of shade thrown at us for being racetrack kids, but I think we all turned out pretty good.”

After graduating from Sallisaw, Partain went on to attend Northeastern Oklahoma (NEO) in Miami. “I was on the rodeo team there. I didn’t do very good but it was fun,” she said, laughing.

From there, she went to OSU as an animal science major, sharing that Dr. Cropp was her absolute favorite professor. “He taught me a lot about the world and how it works—marketing, sales, all those kinds of things,” she said.

Partain is now a special education teacher at Vian Public Schools. So when asked how she ended up teaching after being an animal science major in college, she answered, “I started in animal science because my major was animal science livestock merchandising. At that time the pinnacle for me would have been working at the Heritage Place Sale in Oklahoma City, HUAK or something like that.

“But you know, sometimes life takes interesting turns and when I applied for a job at the Heritage Place, they said that they were having a down time. In the agriculture/ livestock business, there are ebbs and flows, so it was an ebb. It was not flowing.”

Partain said she then reached out to her college professor.

“He told me that if I’d change my major to poultry science, he could find me a job,” she said. “I told him that was true but I didn’t like chickens. I didn’t care for them at all, but I did find that getting paid a really nice salary to tell other people how to cut them up and trying to meet production goals, was a lot more pleasurable than messing with chickens in the barnyard.”

She said that’s how she ended up at Tyson.

“The job market in horses wasn’t great at the time I graduated, so I went to work at the food brokerage. It was a family brokerage and a nice opportunity. I appreciated that, but it was not for me,” she said.

“I went to a Native American job fair at Tulsa and at the time, you’d take a paper resume, go in and they had all the businesses around, and there was a guy there for Tyson trucking,” she said. “I told him I’m not really interested in the trucking part of this, but my advisor told me that this would be a really good place to start. Do you have anything in the corporate office or something like that?”

Partain shared that she didn’t know anything about the chicken business; just what her advisor had told her.

“The man put me in contact with corporate HR and they took me to the Berryville plant. I was in my skirt and pumps, my little heeled shoes, and I went on my first tour of the chicken plant. I thought it would be horrible, I wondered what I got myself into, but it was very clean and everyone was very hardworking,” she said.

“It was a lot different than I expected. I started as a production supervisor and worked my way up. I went on to work at the leadership college in Russellville, Ark., for about three years. They did a reduction in workforce and that was a really interesting time because we were teaching classes, and they were bringing in 50 or so people that they had cut loose. When I went back to the hotel that night, I found out that I, too, had been one of the people that was cut, but I still had to go back and teach the class the next day. So it was really interesting,” she said with a chuckle.

She said teaching at Russellville put her on the trajectory of how she became an educator at Vian.

“I began teaching Sunday School and did vacation bible school at my church, and I had my son during that time so I wanted a more stable life. I didn’t want to be traveling or working overnight, those kind of things,” she said. “I really liked working with the kids at church, so I took my alternative certification and started at Vian. I’ve been there for 15 years now.”

Partain shared she was anxious to get into the teaching field because her son had already started Pre-K.

“I looked into where there was a need and what jobs were available. I asked myself ‘Who was getting hired?’ Turns out, a special education job was available,” she said. She shared that she had a friend in high school who was special needs, so she wasn’t intimidated by special needs situations.

“At the time I didn’t really feel like I was called but as I got into it and did my first couple of years, I knew it was my calling,” she said. “It’s a really hard job. I’ve worked at the racetrack doing all kinds of things for hours, on a maintenance crew with a jackhammer and everything I did in the chicken plant— but there is nothing like the tiredness of going home at the end of the day from a job in education. People don’t really know that. I don’t know if they appreciate that, but it’s true.”

She went to work at Vian Elementary where there were two rooms for special education: a severe room and a mildto- moderate room. Partain did her first year in the mild-to-moderate room.

“It was pretty wild. The kids were fine but your first year is always a bear,” she said.

The following year, administration placed her in the severe room and told her she could trade off each year.

“It was pretty wild, pretty rough. But you know what, it was the kids that nobody wanted and I wanted them. So I kept them,” she said.

She then decided to take on high school students, which she said was a really great change and brought on even more rewards.

“I get to see student growth. I have worked with a student from Pre-K to what will be his senior year this year, and to see the growth from that first year until he graduates, it’s very rewarding, something special,” she shared.

“When a student graduates and I hear they’re doing well, doing something to change the world—I’m not vain to think that I did something really super impactful in that, but to be a part of their story is just nice,” she added.

Partain said when summer rolls around, the thing she looks forward to most is decompressing for a week.

“But after that, I just sit on my porch, drink my coffee and mess with my dogs,” she said.

This school year is different for Partain though because it’s the first year that her son hasn’t been around.

“Sometimes I like to take a trip to Texas to visit him. And every once in a while, I’ll maybe slip in a trip to Lake Tenkiller,” she said.

Outside of her career, Partain enjoys going to concerts. Strong in her faith, she also loves cheering on the Wolverines and spending time with her family.

“I have the greatest brother (Beau Burlison) and I’m very proud of him,” she said. “He works very hard for the county and cares so much about the kids.”

She said when Burlison became District 2 county commissioner, he had to give up coaching.

“The kids loved him so much and really wanted him to come back and coach, so he did part-time and I feel like that was a big deal,” she said.

Partain and her mother, who is affectionately known as ‘Mama Lou,’ have also started a social media experiment making short reels on Instagram called “Rodeo Honey.”

“My mom grew up in the 50s and 60s with her dad on the rodeo trail. He was a world champion cowboy,” she said. “He did stock contracting and also worked with Butler Brothers, who are still in business today. But he was killed when mom was 16. She still has the best memories of him and tells the greatest stories of their time on the road.”

Partain said if she could leave Sequoyah County with one piece of advise, she would tell residents, “Be more like Vian because the thing that made our family fall in love with this area and community is the closeness of Vian. You know, every little place has its flaws, problems, people we like and don’t like, but time after time when someone is in need, they show up. There’s a lot of people that care and I feel like that’s very rare.”

Lastly, the thing that Partain loves most about Sequoyah County is living in an undisclosed location in the Ozark foothills.

“It’s just the quiet, the beauty, you get to see a great sunrise and a great sunset—there’s just nothing like it,” she ended.