Shelley Plett SHS Class of 1983
Shelley Plett is a 1983 SHS graduate. In August after high school graduation, she moved with her family to Vicksburg, Mississippi where she has resided since that time. Shelley attended Hinds Community College in Vicksburg then the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa where she earned her Bachelor of Science in Elementary Education in 1988. She earned her Master’s of Education from Jackson State University in 1991, her Education Specialist from Northeast Louisiana University (now the University of Louisiana at Monroe) in 1994, and
her Ph.D. in Education with a minor in Computer Applications from Mississippi State University in 2000. Shelley taught public school in Vicksburg for 11 years and taught in the evenings at Hinds Community College for 6 years. For 2 years she taught full time at the Hinds Community College Resource and Coordinating Unit for Economic Development. She left public education for 2½ years to teach computer classes at the Isle of Capri
Casino then returned to public education for 13 years where she worked at the administrative offices holding various positions such as District Test Coordinator,
Mississippi Student Information System Database Primary Contact and Director of Technology. She retired from public education in 2017 to take a full-time position
at Vicksburg Catholic Schools where she is entering her 6th year as the Registrar and technology coordinator.
Shelley has loved computers ever since her first programming class at SHS in the 80s where they wrote BASIC programs and played them back on cassette tape recorders. She uses technology to try to make people’s lives better, maintaining a handful of websites, overseeing the live streaming at her church, and offering free lifetime
tech support to special people and friends (she also works for chocolate). Every time she thinks she is too old to learn something new, something new comes along. Her motto is “If it ain’t broke, fix it till it is” and her favorite saying is “TMT . . . too much technology.” After retiring from the public schools with nearly 8000 students, she enjoys the 500 students at the private school. However, there are still not enough hours in the day to get everything accomplished that she wants to do. She has attended Hawkins United Methodist Church for the past 30 years and is employed there part time with communications and technology.
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She returned to Scottsbluff for her 10-year SHS reunion, the year of the Great Flood of 1993. She remembers driving from Mississippi and having to take alternate routes through Kansas on the way to Scottsbluff and she remembers driving home and detouring through Missouri because of closed highways due to the flooding. She can’t believe she graduated from high school 40 years ago this coming May, 2023.