Slidell High School industrial arts teacher Leonard Acker didn’t intend to stay in teaching very long.

After graduating from Mississippi Valley State University, the lanky former football player planned to teach for two or three years, then join a large company before starting his own business.

“I told them upfront what my plans were, because I didn’t want to make any secret out of it,” said Acker. “Then someone on the School Board told me ‘Mr. Acker, I think you work well with students,’ so here I am.”

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This school term marks Acker’s 40th year of teaching. He started at Slidell High in August 1968, and save for one year in Texas in the 1980s, he’s been there ever since. His mother was a teacher and his father a Sunday school superintendent, so education came naturally as a career path.

With a big family, however, he didn’t think college was an option, so like many young men of the time, he assumed he would enter the military. When family friends convinced him to pursue a scholarship, he figured he would give it a try.

He started teaching basic and advanced drafting, as well as woodshop. A few years later he dropped the drafting to focus only on woods, and it turned out to be to his advantage.

The new drafting teacher had a classroom right next to the cafeteria, and when a 1976 fire destroyed that room as well as the gym, the instructor spent the rest of the school year shuttling between classrooms.

With the school celebrating its centennial this year, Acker has seen plenty of changes during his time there. Technological advances have revolutionized most classrooms, but Acker said that’s not the biggest difference he’s noticed.

“It hasn’t really changed the way I teach, because the big focus for me is the machinery, and that hasn’t changed a whole lot,” he said. “The biggest change, I think, is in the students themselves.”

Acker said that in the early years, many of his students had parents who were in industrial arts fields themselves, and they were pushed to be high achievers, with a good number of them becoming successful engineers.

He often said they were often already quite knowledgeable, and once or twice he learned things from them.

Now, however, he feels he has to work harder than ever to keep his students motivated.

From time to time he still learns things from his students, like Robert Arnaud. The 11th-grader plans to take the electronics from a Guitar Hero video game and build a wooden controller to resemble an actual guitar.

Acker is looking as forward to the results as the student.

There are also more girls in his classes these days, which is a far cry from the early days.

“When I first started, girls weren’t allowed to take shop, and boys weren’t allowed to take home economics,” said Acker. “That’s a real big change, and a good one.”

One of the highlights of Acker’s career came in the early 1990s when he was named Teacher of the Year, both at Slidell High and for the parish.

The principal at the time, Joseph Buccaran, told him the percentage of people who had selected him was higher than that for any other person who had previously been named.

He was walking the halls between classes one day when the announcement came that he had won the honor for the parish, and students began cheering wildly. Later he filmed a segment for WVUE Channel 8’s “Making the Grade,” but never got to see it.

“I chose to go to church that day,” said Acker. “I kept meaning to get a copy of it, but just never got around to it.”

Acker said he doesn’t know how long he’ll keep teaching, saying only that he still enjoys it and his students appear to enjoy being taught by him. He advises anyone going into the field not to do it for financial gain.

“Teaching will pay you big dividends and great rewards, but I don’t think about the dollar,” he said. “Molding, shaping and cultivating young minds, preparing them for the future, that’s what I think about.”