This week’s spotlight focuses on Ms. Kimberly White Footman.
Ms. Footman has spent her career helping children within the Colleton County School District for almost two decades. While she may not have been teaching the three Rs, what she did was equally important.
Kimberly is from Colleton County specifically Cottageville. She currently lives in Walterboro, but Cottageville will always be home to her. She attended Cottageville Elementary School in the old building that burned down in 2018. After elementary school Ms. Footman attended middle school at Colleton County Middle School Campus A and then moved up and graduated from Walterboro High School. After high school, Kimberly attended South Carolina State University in Orangeburg and graduated with a degree in Business Administration and Marketing. In 1996, she also got her degree in rehabilitation counseling. After receiving this degree, she became a rehabilitation counselor. Her work career started as an employment specialist and then she moved on to a rehabilitation counselor with the SC Department of Rehabilitation. Her case load consisted of those with alcohol and drug abuse, mental illness, and some physical disability cases. While dealing with some of these cases, Footman became a presence in schools in the Colleton County School District. Her visibility led to a job offer as the Career Development Facilitator with the district. Her first position was at Ruffin Middle School. She worked at there for a year and then requested to be moved to the High School so that childcare for her young son would be easier. After 17 years with the high school and 18 years with the school district, Ms. Footman decided to retire from the public education sector.
Ms. Kimberly firmly believes that the Lord put her on this earth to help others, and she absolutely helped students in the Colleton County School District figure out what they wanted to do beyond the hallways of the school. In her position as Career Development Facilitator, she also had a presence in the business community in Colleton County. Through these connections, it furthered her ability to help her students see the opportunities that were available to them. As far as what was the most rewarding aspect of her job she comments, “It was always rewarding to see the kids focus on going to college, going into the military, or straight into the workforce. Just helping them prepare for their futures was the highlight for me. It was rewarding when they would say thank you and comeback to see me after they graduated.”
One of the projects that Ms. Footman started was the Prom Closet. Working at the high school and getting to know the students she noticed a need. Sometimes in rural areas there aren’t always funds available for someone to purchase a prom dress, but the students naturally still wanted to attend prom. Kimberly thought of the Prom Closet to help students as much as she could with dresses for the event. It grew from there and now not only can a student find a dress, but they can also find shoes and accessories as well. The Prom Closet has been in operation for approximately six or seven years and Kimberly works will Kelly Services to make it happen. She laughed while we were talking about the Prom Closet, and revealed she had dresses in her vehicle right then to take to the school. Ms. Footman also donates dresses to the Special Education Department too for the Valentine’s Day dance they held in February.
Even though she has retired from the school district, Ms. Footman has not retired from the work force completely. She is currently looking for positions in the government sector, but she substitutes in the district through Kelly Services and finds that she enjoys that a lot.
If you remember earlier, I talked about Kimberly requesting to move to the high school to make childcare easy for her very young son. Now her son, is attending South Carolina State University in Orangeburg working toward his degree in Business Economics with the hope of starting his own business when he graduates. We took a moment to catch up on our children because her son and my daughter went to Cottageville Elementary together. Continuing to speak about her family, Ms. Kimberly is the proud daughter of Ms. Alice White Michael. Ms. Michael was with the Head Start program for many, many years and Kimberly followed in her mother’s footsteps of helping children in and out of the classroom.
I asked Ms. Kimberly the $64,000 Question of what would you do if time and money were no obstacle? She answered that she would travel more. She has always wanted to go to Hawaii. She is not interested in island hopping as she wants to decide on the island of her choice and stay there to explore and relax.
