The title of Thomas Wolfe’s novel, ‘You Can’t Go Home Again’, has been used as an analogy for generations to overview a perceived castoff venturing back to their beginnings to succeed in some way.
Those who knew a teenage Sara Conley would have lost the bet that she would ever set foot in her school once she was given the leather-bound paper that said she didn’t have to come back again. Seemingly a lifetime later, Conley has returned as a Ryman to her old school, not just to watch her children grow up, but to show she’s grown up, too.
“I’m not happy with how I was in high school,” quipped Sara. “I did a lot of shaming. I lashed out to authority figures. It’s an embarrassment to think about how I behaved. How I acted. How I treated others.”
But rather than just attending her daughter Savannah’s volleyball games and grumbling about how she hated ‘this place’, Sara Ryman decided to do better. Assuring over and again that she’s nowhere near the spitfire that was Sara Conley, the now married Ryman is a mother of three and a social worker for Fairfield Community Schools.
There is a divine intervention somewhere in her story, being called to return to a place where she herself used to cause chaos among a personal life that was far from stable. But there were glimpses that her teachers saw in her, even when Sara wasn’t on board.
“I was that kid in a different way, and teachers didn’t give up on me,” said Nick Jones, who inherited Conley as a sixth grade teacher. Jones is now serving in an administrative role with Fairfield. As it turned out, Jones was in his first year of teaching at his alma mater and was trying to figure things out on his own. “She didn’t take things out on me. It wasn’t personal. I can’t fix all her things, but I can see you. I was just there for her. I didn’t want to give up on her.”
High school was rough for then Sara Conley, who admitted she didn’t make it easy on anyone. As she got through it, got that diploma and threw the deuces to the parking lot on her way out, she was just looking ahead. As life came at her quickly, so did her daughter, Savannah, a few years later, and a life of change was becoming more of her reality. After eventually meeting her husband and settling into full-time family mode, her passion for social justice grew.
This past summer, Ryman decided to take the step in returning to her old stomping grounds. The anxiety of the jump was real as Ryman was interviewed and later hired. Then she was asked to speak at the teacher day before school started, in front of 200-plus of her peers. Some having never met her, some knowing her dark secrets, others dealing with their own variable anxieties of school beginning in less than 24 hours.
“There’s some pretty incredible people that go here. My kids go here,” she remarked. “I probably wouldn’t have applied for any other social work school positions. I always wanted to come back here. I don’t know what the draw was specifically. I just knew I wanted to come back here. Get back to helping the youth that may be walking through the same things I went through. To know they are not alone.”
Ryman is now into her second full month on campus at Fairfield, but also working as an advocate at Millersburg. The ability to serve has been powerful, to say the least.
“I care very deeply about the lives of the people in this community and their well being,” Ryman said. “I want people to know they are not alone. I went through a lot of the struggles that kids are going through today. It made me who I am today.”
For Sara Ryman, she is living proof that you can go home again.