By James Massara
CCN News Director

GALION — By the end of a teacher’s career educating students, it may not be surprising to hear he or she ended up teaching the son or daughter of a former student.

Teaching the grandchild of a former student, though? Not every educator can make that claim.

But if you ask his students, now-retired Galion social studies teacher Bill Stepro never was like every teacher.

Stepro retired at the end of the 2017-18 school year, with 50 years of teaching experience.

“He’s honestly just an amazing personality behind the teacher,” said Drew Owens, who just finished his sophomore year at Galion High School. “He allowed fun in his class, but also wasn’t easy with it. You had to be there every day or you risked missing information on the quiz that you would have the following day.”

Owens did say, however, Stepro would call the student or his or her parents if the student was out sick, to first make sure the student was OK, and then to pass along the missed information.

Owens had Stepro for world history and then begged to be put into Stepro’s government class, which typically was reserved for juniors.

“I begged because he was such an amazing teacher, and I knew he was retiring,” Owens said.

Stepro said it was the interaction with the students that kept his career going.

“It really was the students,” Stepro said. “They made it still exciting. They weren’t all ‘A’ students, but that doesn’t matter as much as that they were all really good kids.”

While at Galion, Stepro taught American and Ohio history classes and geography at the junior high level, and taught government, geography and world and American history classes at the high school level.

Despite his initial lack of an education degree, as he obtained a history degree from Miami University, Stepro said his mother encouraged him to consider teaching.

Stepro said his start in education came when then-Galion City Schools Superintendent Clyde Forry traveled to Oxford and interviewed various Miami students.

Stepro was hired as a junior high teacher at Galion which, being from northeast Ohio originally, he was not entirely sure where it was.

“I saw a shirt that had the outline of the state of Ohio with a question mark inside it and it said, ‘Where the hell is Galion, Ohio,’ and, honestly though that’s not an appropriate shirt for school, that was my exact thought,” Stepro said.

But he made Galion home.

“I thought maybe I’d stay a year or two and then move on,” Stepro said. “But, then I just really enjoyed working with the kids here and here we are.”

Stepro said if he had to give one piece of final advice to his students, it would be that hopefully they learned something, and they should be active and vote and continue to learn and better themselves and their community.

As far as retirement goes, Stepro said he plans to relax, read some more and hopefully take his wife on a few trips.