Lynchburg Reporter

..From an early age growing up on her family’s Charlotte County farm, Hezteine Foster felt a calling to become a teacher.

“I knew when I started elementary school I wanted to go into education,” said Foster, who still resides in her native county. “It was one of my passions. I just felt like I could help somebody.”

Her parents, who she said taught the importance of respect, managing finances and pursuing education, were her biggest inspiration.

“Mama believed in education because she felt like that’s the only way we were going to get to where we are and to where we want to go,” said Foster, who has spent most her life in education and currently serves as director of academics at the Legacy Education Center in Lynchburg.

Foster found time to devote to schooling while also having plenty to do on the farm with orchard trees and cattle, as well as growing tobacco, wheat and corn.

“Everybody had a role to play,” said Foster of her rural upbringing alongside her brothers and sisters. “My father believed in the division of labor and everyone had something to do.”

The three-room schoolhouse for Black students she attended with family members and friends, and later Central High School in Charlotte County, produced many happy memories she still cherishes.

She recalls growing up during segregation and having little interaction with white people except at the store. For a while, her older sister lived away from their home to attend school because buses were not running for Black children, Foster recalled during a recent interview.

The family remained positive throughout such challenges and discrimination, she said.

“My family was a very progressive family, and I felt like in order to really advance you can’t be angry, because if you’re angry you put too much energy in that,” she said.

Foster went to Virginia University of Lynchburg, then operating under a previous name, and Bluefield State College in West Virginia, two historically Black colleges. She worked at VUL a year before getting a teaching job at Carver-Price High School in Appomattox County.

She said was the first Black teacher to integrate in Appomattox County’s public schools in the 1960s and recalls a letter from the superintendent at the time asking who wanted to teach at the elementary school.

“The first thought that came to my mind was, ‘Well, somebody’s got to do it,’” she said.

She recalls seeing burning crosses and didn’t know at the time she was the focus of the hate-filled symbols until her mailbox was bombed.

“That was a pretty, pretty trying time,” Foster said of being only Black teacher in the school system for a period. “That didn’t deter me. I was determined I was going to do what I had to do to help people.”

Despite the outrage among some in the community at the time, she said fellow teachers on her hall were particularly nice and she had the superintendent’s support.

“I felt like it was something that had to be done, and everybody in the school system was very nice to me,” said Foster. “I was focused on my tasks.”

She recalls having two Black students when integration began in Appomattox and said all of the children were nice.

“I loved working with them,” Foster said.

Foster said the words of a past VUL president while she was working there stayed with her.

“‘You are the educators,’” Foster remembers him saying. “That had been on my mind and I’ve been doing it ever since.”

Her late husband also was a great supporter of her breaking new ground in the education field and told her “go ahead and do what you have to do.”

Foster retired from Appomattox schools in 1991, taught about eight years at Longwood University and also worked again at VUL, where she met Randy Dunton, who coached women’s basketball there and now serves as executive director of the Legacy Education Center.

Dunton remembers meeting Foster in 2012 and described her as “generational educator.”

“…With Dr. Foster you have an aggressive tenacity to overcome the obstacles, path to resistance and provide the needed assistance to help students succeed,” Dunton said. “What she does at her age is so uncommon and so special. I pinch myself every day saying, ‘Wow, I get to hang out with Dr. Foster.’ She is one of the leading trailblazers.”

The Legacy Education Center on Rivermont Avenue in Lynchburg works with students to foster life skills, support academics and help students pursue careers in the local workforce. Dunton is in awe of Foster’s work ethic.

“Most people at her stage in her journey have long ago chosen the easy chair,” Dunton said. “She’s still logging forward and breaking new trails, cutting away the brush, so she can be a trailblazer for as many people as she possibly can.”

Foster sets the stage for where the center is headed academically and oversees it daily, he said.

“We want to see change brought to support individuals who are not getting their talent into the workplace at the same level we think they’re capable of contributing,” Dunton said. “That requires a program, it requires systems, and she’s a skilled strategist.”

Foster is highly effective in counseling students and is a compassionate, empathetic educator, Dunton said.

“She’s walked through it; she’s seen it,” he said of her many experiences.

The Dr. Hezteine Foster College & Career Bound GED Program, which was dedicated in her honor in late 2021, embodies who she is, Dunton said.

“Dr. Foster is all about student growth,” he said. “She would not want individuals to not reach their fullest.”

Foster also is president of the Central High Museum, which honors the legacy of her high school, holds heartfelt reunions and awards scholarships to local youth. She is active in the NAACP and dedicated to helping people overcome poverty.

“I just saw the need and that’s what I did,” she said of joining the Legacy center.

Looking back on her roads traveled in education, Foster is proud of the mileage.

“I feel like if I can make a little difference in the lives of someone, my living will not be in vain,” she said.

"It was one of my passions. I just felt like I could help somebody." — Hezteine Foster, on knowing from an early age she wanted to be an educator