When M’Lissa Hester started college at Texas Tech, she planned to study to continue the medical career she had started in the Army.

“I was a 92-V-10, which was a lab technician,” said Hester, who is originally from Panhandle.

She had enlisted under the delayed entry program before her senior year of high school, and started boot camp the summer after graduation.

“I graduated in ’87 and went right in,” she said.

For three years, Hester was a lab technician in the Army, and then was in the Army Reserves. During the first Gulf War, she was called up to staff Fort Hood when the medical staff normally there went to Iraq.

That’s when she met Brian Hester, who is now her husband. Both were in the same Reserve unit and they met on the plane to Fort Hood. They have been married for 19 years.

Brian is still in the medical field, Hester said, but her college studies were interrupted by the birth of her first son in 1993.

Something about having a child made her want to be a teacher instead of continuing in the medical field, she said. She graduated from Texas Tech with a bachelor’s degree in multidisciplinary studies in December 1997.

Her career focus switched again in 1998 with the birth of her youngest son. He was born with fluid in his ears that kept him from hearing clearly for the first few years of his life.

Hester said she was inspired by him to become a special education teacher. Now she is the fifth-grade interventionist at North Ridge Elementary School, where she has taught for five years. She has taught in the Frenship Independent School District for eight years.

The money she makes as a teacher is not what inspires her, Hester said.

“We don’t do it for the money. We do it for the satisfaction of helping kids,” she said.

Sometimes Hester said she misses the camaraderie of being in the Army, but she said that while being in the Army is like being in a family, so is being part of the North Ridge teaching staff.

“Sometimes I think we spend more time here than with family,” she said.