Charlene Couvillon was sitting in a car dealership in Montgomery, Alabama, with her longtime friend and former colleague Alexis Tibbetts when the call came from Fort Walton Beach High School. She had been selected for the Viking Hall of Fame.

Her first reaction was pure Couvillon.

“Oh, my gosh. They’ve run out of people,” she said, laughing. “I don’t think that I’m really worthy of this honor. I just did my job.”

That job stretched nearly four decades across Okaloosa County: 10 years teaching at Bruner Middle School, 10 more in the classroom at Fort Walton Beach High School, six at the district level and more than a decade back at the high school as assistant principal and then principal. She retired in March 2015.

And if there is one thread that ties those chapters together, Couvillon said, it is that none of them were part of some master plan she had.

“Every move I made was not really something that I desired or longed for,” she said. “It just kind of fell in my lap.”

The beginning of a career

Couvillon graduated from Williston High School in central Florida in 1971, spent two years at Valdosta State and then transferred to the University of West Florida. She married her husband, Larry, in August 1975 and got her first teaching job at Bruner Junior High School that same school year, teaching English.

She stayed for a decade. 

Bruner at the time had roughly 2,000 students, one of the largest middle schools in the state, and ran two of nearly everything: two football teams, two cheerleading squads, two basketball teams, two baseball teams.

“You just got out in the halls and you moved with the flow,” she said. “It was a huge school.”

The school was twice the size of any other middle school in the county, she said, and the only rule was that Bruner Blue and Bruner Orange could not compete against each other.

Couvillon’s son Marc was born in 1980, and when he started at Bruner as a sixth grader, his homeroom was in the same room where she had been teaching while pregnant with him.

By 1985, after nearly a decade of teaching seventh graders John Steinbeck’s “The Red Pony,” she knew it was time to switch things up.

“When I could anticipate what the students were going to ask me, I thought, ‘This is time for a change,'” she said.

Twelfth graders and trees in the classroom

The change came when the curriculum coordinator at Fort Walton Beach High School called Bruner about an English opening. The teachers at the high school wanted to see if Couvillon was interested. Larry had just transferred there to teach history, and she initially said no, wanting to give him a year to get settled. 

The next year, another opening came up, and she took it.

She went from 35 kids in a class at Bruner to no more than 15 in 12th grade under a program called Writing Skills Enhancement, which required students to write an essay a week. It was a welcomed change, but her habits from a decade of junior high did not disappear overnight.

One day, her honors students sat her down and told her they had something to discuss. They needed her to remember that they were not seventh graders, Couvillon recalled. She did not need to walk up and down the aisles to make sure they were doing their work. Just give the assignment and leave them alone.

“I’ve had about six weeks of you guys,” she told them. But she took their advice.

Couvillon taught 12th grade honors English literature, from Beowulf to Chaucer to Shakespeare to the Romantics, and brought the material to life in ways she wanted her students to remember.

When it was time to introduce Macbeth, she and Larry went into the woods and cut down trees. He set them up inside her classroom, and she added dry ice bubbling in a pot. The students walked in to find a forest with objects hanging from the branches: a crown, a bloody knife, figures in the trees. She told them they were going to play 20 questions, and that the activity would introduce the next work of literature they were about to study.

• “‘Is that a crown in that tree?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Is that a bloody knife in that tree?’ ‘Yes,'” she said. “And so that was kind of the introduction to Macbeth.”

For Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” the culminating activity was a feast. Students dressed as one of the characters and performed group poses representing each character’s central flaw or defining trait. And when they studied Macbeth’s fall from power, she had students draw their own parallels.

“They talked about O.J. Simpson. They talked about Richard Nixon,” she said. “It was trying to show them that human nature has not changed over all the years.”

That was her goal in every lesson, she said: get students to connect literature from centuries ago to the world they lived in.

“I wanted them to make the connection from yesterday to today,” she said. “I thought that was important for them to have an understanding of human nature and what literature showed us, that human nature is human nature.”

Larry taught history just around the corner from her classroom. He had 10th graders; she had 12th. They had different planning periods and their students rarely overlapped, so the one time they saw each other during the school day was lunch, which they spent with a small group of fellow teachers in her classroom.

“We laughed so hard,” she said. “It was such a nice break in the day.”

To the district, and a career without bells

After 10 years in the classroom at Fort Walton Beach High School, her mentor, who had become the director of secondary education at the district level, encouraged her to apply for the supervisor of language arts position. Couvillon did not set out to leave the classroom, but she recognized a familiar feeling.

“I want to leave when I’m still excited about teaching,” she said.

She got the job, overseeing language arts and social studies for the district. But just like the move from middle to high school, this adjustment had its own set of quirks.

“The first day at the district office, I kept waiting for the bell to ring so I could go to the bathroom,” she said. “And then I realized there were no bells.”

In that role, she visited classrooms across the county, helped roll out the Sunshine State Standards and prepared teachers for the arrival of FCAT. She hand-delivered a copy of the new standards to every English and social studies teacher in the district.

She also spent time mentoring young educators across the county. Among them was Marcus Chambers, then a sixth grade English teacher at Ruckel Middle School. The two sat down together each summer and mapped out his entire teaching year in pencil.

• “We did that every summer for two or three summers,” she said. “We always had a really good relationship.” 

Chambers is now the superintendent of Okaloosa County schools.

Back to Fort Walton

Couvillon spent about six years at the district level before her career took another unplanned turn.

A new superintendent reorganized the district office, and positions were shuffled. Couvillon found out she was being reassigned when a colleague ran into her at the grocery store and asked whether she was headed to Fort Walton Beach High School or Choctaw. 

She had no idea what he was talking about.

After a few phone calls, she learned her position had been reassigned and she was being moved to an assistant principal role at Fort Walton Beach High School. She had not applied. But Principal Bobby Walton welcomed her, and she reported for duty.

“And that’s how I got back to Fort Walton,” she said.

A family woven into the school

By the time Couvillon returned to the high school as assistant principal in 2001, the building was all too familiar for the entire family. Larry was still teaching history there, and their daughter Katie was starting her freshman year.

The arrangement raised an administrative question. Okaloosa County had a rule that an administrator and a spouse could not work in the same school. But the school board decided an exception was warranted, particularly since Couvillon had not asked for the transfer. The board directed that she would not evaluate her husband or take parental phone calls about him, and left it at that.

Katie spent some of those years eating lunch in her mother’s office. And Couvillon got something most parents never do: the chance to see her daughter move through high school from inside the building rather than waiting at home for the stories after the fact.

The Couvillons had moved to Shannon Court, one block from Bruner and two blocks from the high school, specifically so their children could attend those schools. Couvillon’s entire career in the classroom and front office, with the exception of her six years at the district, played out within walking distance of her front door.

The principalship

In 2006, when Tibbetts was elected superintendent, Couvillon was offered the principalship at Fort Walton Beach High School. Tibbetts initially wanted her to come to the district office instead.

“I’ve already been there,” Couvillon told her.

She applied for the principal’s job.

“Nobody else applied,” she said, “and I got the job.”

The timing carried a certain symmetry. The stadium project had been underway during her years as assistant principal, and the Class of 2004 was the first to graduate at Steve Riggs Field at Viking Stadium, though the facility was not yet fully complete. The Class of 2005 graduated at Choctaw while construction continued. By 2006, Couvillon’s first year as principal, the stadium was finished.

“To have the first graduating class there the year I became principal was great,” she said.

Couvillon’s nine years as principal carried the full weight of the job. She navigated severe state budget cuts that stripped millions from school funding year after year. In 2008, Niceville High School student Taylor Haugen passed away from an abdominal injury sustained during a football game against Fort Walton Beach High School. The loss shook not only both school communities, but the county.

But the job brought many moments that she holds onto even today. The school earned A ratings from the state. Teachers were recognized at the state level. Students earned honors including the National High School Heisman. And a Fort Walton Beach High School student received the first Taylor Haugen Award, which Couvillon called especially meaningful.

Through it all, she relied on her team.

“I had such a good team,” she said. “I had low points, yes, but I loved my job. I’ve loved every job I had in education.”

And although titles changed throughout the decades, she kept returning to a principle she had carried with her since her first days in the classroom.

• “At heart, I have always been and will always be a teacher first,” she said. “I supported the teachers. I always tried to be fair, to the kids and to the teachers.”

She recalled a conversation with a teacher who was frustrated about an administrative decision. She told the teacher that she had walked in their shoes, but they had never walked in hers. Sometimes principals have to make decisions that teachers do not agree with, she said, for reasons they may never fully know.

“And most of the teachers understood that,” she said.

Retirement and perspective

Couvillon retired in March 2015. Her successor, John Spolski, now the district’s assistant superintendent, stepped in during a difficult moment in her life. Couvillon’s mother was in critical condition during her final weeks at the school, and her mother’s funeral fell on what would have been her last working day.

“The fact that I could leave, go down there and be with her, and John just took right over, and I never had to think a thing about school, that was really special,” she said.

In the years that followed, she made a conscious effort to be out of town on the first day of school.

• “I had a lot of first days of school,” she said. “As a student and as a teacher and then an administrator. I just couldn’t be at home doing nothing or watch the school buses.”

She and Larry moved to Milton in 2023 to be closer to Katie and her family, and the daily lives of school have faded. But she still watches from a distance, always checking the school’s grade, always interested.

“I still see a very positive place for kids and teachers,” she said. “I think it is still doing the community a great service in the kind of kids it produces.”

She credited the current principal, Lindsey Smith, whom she and Tibbetts hired years ago.

“She is fabulous,” Couvillon said. “When I left, I left it in good hands with John, and then John left it in good hands with Lindsey. I just think its excellence continues.”

What she hopes never changes

Asked what she hopes stays the same about Fort Walton Beach High School no matter who leads it, Couvillon did not hesitate.

“The school spirit,” she said. “It’s always been there.”

She recalled pep rallies where students chanted “I believe that we will win” during seasons when the football team had not won a game.

“But in their heart they believed that we would,” she said. “Our student section has always been so vibrant. I just hope it never changes because it’s been such an important part.”

Couvillon will be inducted into the Viking Hall of Fame during halftime of the varsity football game on Friday, Sept. 11, at Steve Riggs Field at Viking Stadium.