Mr. Carnal retires after a big year

Jim Carnal will be retiring from Taft High this year. He started at Taft High in 1998. One of Carnal’s favorite, most memorable contributions to Taft High have been coaching the tennis teams and taking them to Valley Championships where the boys won in 2018 and the girls won in 2012. They were the first-ever Valley winners. He has coached 19 seasons total with the girls, and 10 seasons with the boys. Carnal has also taught all four levels of English throughout his years; he is the Public Information Officer, and he taught Yearbook for a total of nine years, which were award-winning. In addition to these contributions, he even taught the English portions of SAT classes for a little over 10 years.

Carnal says he will miss the kind staff, but overall he will miss the students at the school that tend to always put a smile on his face. He said, “Even when the students are having bad days or don’t do well in my class they still manage to brighten my day by their kind words or with their bright smiles when they see me throughout the day.” He also said that his fondest memory at Taft High was coaching with Bill and Linda Friend. He shared that he hopes his classroom enthusiasm and spirit inspired English students to love reading. Carnal’s wife is retiring as well, so they will spend most their time watching their first and only grandson, Joseph James, traveling, and reading and writing in their spare time. The retiring couple’s daughter lives in Thailand for work and he and his wife plan to visit her while she’s there.

Carnal has enjoyed helping and encouraging his students to graduate and is excited to watch them walk across the stage at graduation. To add about Taft High, Carnal’s personal thoughts about the financial situation happening with the school are, “It is unfortunate, drastic the way it is being dealt with, for it should’ve been done in multiple years instead of only this one year, and it is sad to see.” In addition, Carnal says the morale is low because of budgets, and that, “Taft High will come back. It is just a down time right now.”

Carnal loves Taft High. He says that Taft High, over his several years of working here, has calmed him down through the years as well as given him more patience and has even humbled him in ways. To wrap up, Carnal has made many memorable contributions to Taft High, through coaching and teaching, and will forever be remembered for all of those and much more. As he tells a few of his students, he is going out this year, but at least he is going out with a “bang!”