Raine ‘Mrs. A.’ Anselmo
A vessel of the Lord
A vessel of the Lord
There are people, places, and things in this world which can easily be described as quintessential: Babe Ruth, the Grand Canyon, apple pie. For those who know her, Raine “Mrs. A” Anselmo, is the quintessence of a first-grade Catholic school teacher. She is truly joyful, genuinely kind, humbly Christ-centered, and beyond energetic. It is worth mentioning that very rarely does her face not feature her signature bright and sincere smile. As she prepares for her 22nd school year at St. Rose Academy in Birmingham, she honestly admits to not being able to see herself anywhere else.
There are people, places, and things in this world which can easily be described as quintessential: Babe Ruth, the Grand Canyon, apple pie. For those who know her, Raine “Mrs. A” Anselmo, is the quintessence of a first-grade Catholic school teacher. She is truly joyful, genuinely kind, humbly Christ-centered, and beyond energetic. It is worth mentioning that very rarely does her face not feature her signature bright and sincere smile. As she prepares for her 22nd school year at St. Rose Academy in Birmingham, she honestly admits to not being able to see herself anywhere else.
Growing up, though, she didn’t see education as her path in life. She loved kids, having worked at summer camps each year in her native Louisiana, but she assumed that love would be realized as a wife and mother. When she found herself at the University of Alabama studying advertising, after just one class, she knew something wasn’t right. She met with her advisor and was asked, “What do you like to do?” She answered, “I want to be a mom, and I know I want to work.” Without hesitation, the advisor replied, “Well, how about education? You have the energy for it!”
She took an introductory course and realized teaching came naturally to her. She remembers thinking, “Maybe this is my God gift.” She got her first job teaching kindergarten at St. Barnabas Catholic School in Birmingham. “If you think I have energy now,” she jests, “you should have seen me back then!”
After three years of teaching, she welcomed her first child, and for the next 11 years, she focused on raising her four children as a stay-at-home mom. Life’s twists and turns led her back to teaching. A good friend and former St. Barnabas teacher, Ginger Hensley, mentioned an opening at St. Rose Academy where she was teaching. Anselmo applied and “the rest is history.”
“Being able to come back to another Catholic school and live out my calling,” she explains, “has been one of the biggest blessings of my life, aside from my own children and now grandbabies.”
Her blessing can easily be seen as a reciprocal blessing to those in her classroom. Mrs. A. views her classroom not only as an academic haven but also as a wellspring for evangelization. “This is me being used in the most beautiful way by the Lord,” she contends. “It would be very hard, for me personally, to not be able to talk about God and not be able to reference Him in all the things that we do all day long. … I don’t have to say, ‘Oh, I’m Catholic, but that’s only on the weekends.’ … We get to mold the child in the faith. We get to instill in them the virtues and values of the Catholic faith. Every time a class graduates, I think to myself, ‘Maybe one thing we did helped to form them into the people that they are today,’ and I don’t take that lightly at all.”
