Elva Humphreys said that growing up, she always wanted to become a school teacher.
She could not have predicted that a lifelong career in education would lead her to make history as the first female school superintendent in Louisiana.
“I wanted to teach when I was a little girl,” she said.
As a child in Lincoln Parish, she had a friend who was more into sports, and the two would take turns playing ball and playing school. Humphreys graduated from Louisiana Tech University and began teaching her first classes in Lincoln Parish in 1942.
Since then, “I’ve taught everything from the third grade to the university level.”
Her first husband, Roy McCann, was stationed in Tennessee when the U.S. entered World War II. Humphreys joined him there for the war’s duration, teaching English and Spanish.
“Then we got homesick for Louisiana,” she said.
The couple returned here by way of Montgomery County, Texas. Her husband’s employment with Columbian Carbon Co., located in Fairbanks and Swartz, led her to apply for teaching positions in the Morehouse Parish school system. She began teaching fourth grade at East Side Elementary.
After her first husband passed away a few years later, Humphreys said she decided to return to Tennessee to earn her master’s degree in educational leadership at Peabody College, now part of Vanderbilt University.
She returned to Morehouse Parish after graduation. When the principal at Oak Hill Elementary was involved in a car accident, Humphreys was asked to take over as principal forpart of the school year.
She then accepted an invitation to teach future educators at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Here she met an assistant dean from the University of Wyoming who invited her to teach summer courses in Laramie, which she would do for several years.
While living in Florida, Humphreys said one of her English students was the daughter of a Cuban man who had moved his family there during the Cuban Missile Crisis of Oct. 1962. The father later expressed his gratitude by giving her a case of rum.
“I came back from Florida and began teaching at the old Central Junior High,” she said. “That was my very favorite job. I thoroughly enjoyed it.”
Central Junior High School was located on South Washington at the later site of the Morehouse Parish school system bus barn. Humphreys said she taught there for 10 years, during which time she also taught summer courses at Peabody College and Northwestern State University in Natchitoches.
Her unique hobby of collecting leprechauns began with St. Patrick’s Day gifts from two students at Central Junior High.
“Henceforth the leprechauns came, and they’ve been coming ever since,” she said.
Students, friends and family have given her so many leprechaun figurines, dolls and garden ornaments in the decades since that she is uncertain how many she has. She has received so many leprechauns that some of them have had to be put into storage.
Morehouse Parish School Superintendent O.L. Harper asked Humphreys to serve as curriculum supervisor, a post she would hold for 10 years. When the federal government required Louisiana to desegregate its schools in 1969, Humphreys and her co-workers were responsible for moving teachers among the schools.
“We had to ask every teacher to come in so we could re-assign them,” she said. “That was not an easy task. One lady said, ‘I know this isn’t easy and I brought you flowers. I’ll work anywhere you send me.’”
The Morehouse Parish School Board elected Humphreys to be Louisiana’s first female school superintendent in Dec. 1978.
“Mr. Harper had decided to retire,” she said. “It never even occurred to me to apply for the job.”
A friend recommended Humphreys to Harper, and he recommended her to the school board. She was engaged to second husband Leland Humphreys at the time and took office in July 1979.
Humphreys said those school board members who had not voted for her promised to support her afterward. A co-worker wished her well, but said he could not work for a woman and retired.
“At the first [state] superintendent’s meeting, I could not have been treated any better,” she remembers. “One of the speakers said, ‘We used to have some good jokes, but we won’t use them since there’s a lady present.’”
Humphreys said she was contacted for advice by the state’s second female superintendent, elected in Jefferson Parish a short time later.
Humphreys said she served the remaining two years of Harper’s term and one additional year, from 1979-1982. Superintendents normally served four-year terms, but Humphreys retired a year early due to an illness in her family.
“Nobody had done it before,” she said of her time as the first female superintendent. “But it turned out okay. I’m glad I did it. I had a wonderful staff at the school board office and everybody [in the school system] was most cooperative.”
Humphreys received several awards during and after her time as superintendent.
In 1981 she received the Outstanding Educator Award from the Louisiana Association of School Executives. Upon her retirement, she received a plaque of recognition from the Louisiana Association of School Superintendents and was asked to speak at one of their meetings.
She has made her home in Bastrop ever since, and has many fond memories from her long career in education.
“I loved teaching,” she said. “I’ve taught a lot of things in a lot of places, and I’ve never quite got over feeling excited when I see children waiting for the school bus or playing outside at recess.”
