Washington’s Schantz retires after 41 years in education

Regina Schantz’s love of Spanish was born in an unlikely place: Sweden.

After graduating high school, Schantz spent a year as an exchange student in Sweden where she took classes exclusively in Swedish. When she enrolled in college, her love of languages pushed her toward studying Spanish, which she majored in and eventually found a career in as a high school Spanish instructor.

After 41 years in the profession, Schantz is ready to pass the teaching baton to the next instructor.

Schantz is retiring from Washington High School, where she has taught Spanish for the past 17 years. Before that, she taught at WACO for 14 years. Schantz said she and her husband, Dave, are not planning to move now that she’s retired because Dave still is farming, and “farmers never retire,” she said.

They do plan to travel more, especially to places they’ve never been before that are on their bucket list, like Barcelona.

Early life

Schantz grew up in the town of Nichols and attended West Liberty High School. She participated in Rotary’s student exchange program that sent her to Sweden for a year. She knew no Swedish when she went, but she enrolled in a beginning Swedish class for immigrants. Many of her friends spoke English, but she told them she was determined to learn Swedish, and by the time she left the country, she had become fluent in the language.

She enrolled at the University of Northern Iowa as an undecided major, and saw that she could get five credits by taking elementary Spanish as a general education class. She had taken French in high school, and had just learned Swedish, so by this time Schantz was developing a love of languages. She enjoyed her Spanish class, and signed up for another one the following semester.

“I was really drawn to Spanish because I hadn’t taken it yet, and I could see how it was tied in with lots of careers,” Schantz recalls.

Schantz said she has no Spanish-connection in her family, none of whom speak the language. She was inspired to learn it mostly from rubbing shoulders with Europeans who start studying English in second grade and sometimes add a language or two in high school. She wanted to do the same.

After her junior year at UNI, Schantz spent the summer in Burgos, a city in the north of Spain. She lived with a Spanish family and put her language skills to use every day.

“That was a huge boost for my Spanish right before my senior year,” Schantz said. “It was a new accent for me, because all my professors at UNI were from Cuba, so I had an odd accent.”

Substitute teaching

After graduating from UNI, Schantz got married. For a few years, she substitute taught at four small schools in eastern Iowa such as Preston and Bellevue, and didn’t use her Spanish very much. However, substitute teaching gave her a good background in classroom management.

“I could see how other teachers enforced their classroom rules, and I learned how to handle a class where I didn’t know the students names,” Schantz said. “I had to establish that feeling that I’m in charge and you’re going to follow my rules.”

Schantz said substitute teaching is a job that kept her on her toes because each morning she could get a call telling her which classroom she was responsible for that day, so each day was different. However, she also had a chance to do long-term substitute teaching for teachers out on maternity leave, and that meant she was responsible for the same class each day for six weeks.

“I got to know the students better and was able to create a lesson plan,” Schantz said.

Spanish career begins

Regina and Dave moved to Van Horn, where Dave started a job at Benton Community School District. When the school year began, Schantz was planning to substitute teach again, but the assistant principal asked her if she could teach one class of Spanish every day.

“I was thrilled,” Schantz said. “I got a job, and I didn’t have to interview!”

Schantz said it was great to finally have her own classroom where she got to put her own personal touch on the curriculum with her own ways of doing things.

At that time in the mid-1980s, foreign language classes were not as common as they are today. Schantz said this was an era before the three regent universities began requiring foreign language courses. That changed in 1986.

“It all happened at once,” Schantz remembers. “Once the universities started requiring foreign language, I suddenly became a full-time teacher with four Spanish 1 classes in a day. By the fourth class, it was challenging because I’d ask the students, ‘Have I told this to you yet?’”

Trips

While at Benton, Schantz began taking her students on trips to Mexico where they got to put their Spanish to use.

“It was a benefit for them and wonderful for me, because I was able to be back in a Spanish-speaking country and speak Spanish at the level I needed to,” Schantz said. “It was great to talk to the bus driver, the waiters, or just anyone on a park bench.”

Schantz continued this tradition of trips to Mexico when she started teaching at WACO. In all, she estimates she’s taken 12 trips to the country. After that, she began taking her students on trips to Costa Rica, where she’s been 10 times.

“Students tell me that was the beginning of their love of travel,” Schantz said. “They’d come back to Spanish class in the fall and tell stories about how they used their Spanish when they got lost.”

When Schantz took her students to Mexico, they stayed in hotels, but when she switched to going to Costa Rica, she decided it was better for the students to spend their time with a Costa Rican family.

Schantz said that when all the students in the state were sent home in the spring of 2020 due to the pandemic, she got a taste of retirement, and decided that it was looking better and better.

“I have six grandkids all 4 years old and under, and soon they’ll be in school,” she said. “I don’t want to wait one more year for my grandkids to get older.”