In 1969 Paul Evans and his wife, Trudy, trudyevans.com , joined the National Teacher Corps and the Peace Corp, respectively.
Trudy was to pursue a Peace Corp assignment in South America, but the program ended, and she joined Paul in Southern Appalachia where he was assigned to the National Teacher Corps. The National Teacher Corps, had been established in 1965 as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, aimed to improve education in low-income areas by recruiting and training teachers to serve in underserved communities.
Southern Appalachia was a focal point for the National Teacher Corps due to its deep-seated educational disparities. The region faced chronic underfunding of schools, limited access to quality teaching resources, and socio-economic barriers that hindered student success.
Not being trained as an educator, Paul had liberal arts and science undergraduate studies, but a hallmark of the National Teacher Corps was its emphasis on recruiting individuals with liberal arts, not teaching degrees. Teacher Corps prioritized candidates with strong academic foundations in the humanities, sciences, and arts.
Paul accepted his assignment in the mountains of Southern Appalachia, not far from where the best-selling folk studies book, Foxfire, was written and published. In Southern Appalachia, Foxfire became part of the local curriculum materials along with other culturally appropriate tools. The Foxfire project stands as a testament to the power of experiential education and community involvement. Decades after its inception, “The Foxfire Book” continues to be a primary resource for those interested in Appalachian culture and the enduring talent of its people.
Following Teacher Corps Paul and Trudy moved to Williamsburg, Virginia where Paul had a graduate assistantship at William and Mary and Trudy worked for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Paul completed his advanced graduate certificate as a psychologist at William and Mary.
Next, they moved to Athens, Georgia, where Paul received a research assistantship and entered doctoral studies at the University of Georgia.
At the University of Georgia Paul was responsible for providing assistance to faculty and students in the use of statistical analysis programs (SAS, Biomedical Data Systems (BMD, etc.), and writing the job control language and Fortran coding on the IBM 360 to test research significance. He also completed a graduate resident internship in psychology at the Georgia Center for Developmental Disabilities. On completion of his doctorate he became a policy analyst/psychologist for the state of South Carolina, Office of Programs for the Handicapped, and later, a policy analyst/program evaluator at the National Science Foundation (NSF) in Washington, DC.
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