Leigh Walker Stanley
Leigh Walker Stanley is the 2022 recipient of the Distinguished Service Award for her 34 years of dedicated and diligent work in education as a classroom teacher and her current 6 years of volunteer work on the Atlanta Education Foundation. Stanley, an Atlanta native and lifetime Rabbit, attended Atlanta schools all 12 years of her youth graduating in 1974. Mrs. Stanley taught 32 of her 34 year teaching career in an Atlanta ISD classroom-28 years at Atlanta Primary and 4 years at Atlanta Elementary.
During her years as a classroom educator, she served on numerous campus and district leadership committees composing mission statements, school mottos, and campus plans while other times contributing on panels, search teams, and writing grants. Surrounded by phenomenal and insightful co-workers, Stanley and her colleagues introduced, implemented, and embraced innovative teaching methods, the latest technological tools and top-notch language arts and mathematics programs for Atlanta’s young learners. Each teaching strategy established a valuable foundation for Primary and Elementary students that enabled them to achieve success.
Over the years, Mrs. Stanley’s Primary classroom experience ranged from a grade level self-contained concept to a departmentalized setting which included instructing GT classes, designing a second grade science lab, co-leading a Junior Master Gardener afterschool program, and eventually becoming a math interventionist at the Elementary. In the classroom, Stanley utilized the whole language approach as well as rote memorization techniques, incorporated visual, auditory and kinesthetic learning styles in her lesson plans, investigated science phenomena and explored social studies events with her students. Literature, science, and social studies were Mrs. Stanley’s beloved subjects as was evident in her classroom environment, creative projects and unique student portfolios. Mrs. Stanley is immensely proud of the success of her many former students that continued their education and are now skilled tradesmen, doctors, nurses, lawyers, architects, engineers, bankers, businessmen, government officials, preachers, writers, principals, and, especially, classroom teachers!
Since her retirement in 2016, Leigh has joined her husband, Danny, as a board member of Atlanta Grade School Friends. This volunteer group has worked tirelessly to stabilize, rehabilitate, restore, and preserve one of Atlanta’s historic buildings, the 1936 Atlanta Miller Grade School.
The Stanleys are active members of First Baptist Church, Atlanta. Danny (AHS Class of 1973) and Leigh (AHS Class of 1974) have been married for 47 years. They have two children, Jill Howard (AHS Class of 1997) and husband Cody (AHS Class of 1996), and Bret Stanley (AHS Class of 2001) and wife Stephanie. The Stanleys are proud grandparents of Kade and Madelynn Howard Hill (AHS Class of 2020), Brooklynn (AHS Class of 2022) and Hollan Howard (AHS Class of 2026), and Blaire and Walker Stanley of Houston. Leigh is the daughter of Don and Biddy Walker formerly of Atlanta and both Rabbit graduates, Class of 1947 and 1949 respectively.
They say, “To teach is to touch a life forever”, In Leigh Stanley’s case it was her life that was profoundly and forever touched the most by her Atlanta educator mother, her Atlanta educator daughter, and especially by the extraordinary students and staff of Atlanta ISD.