Sisters teacher heads Down Under

Julia Sweeton taught school for 30 years - 20 of them at Sisters Elementary School. Now she's off on a new adventure, headed Down Under to Australia.

Colleagues and friends at Sisters Elementary School bade her bon voyage at a gathering last week.

"The plan now is to go to Australia and begin the process of residency there," Sweeton told The Nugget. Her daughter Ashley Albury married an Australian and lives there in a town just outside Brisbane.

"This will be the first Christmas we've been together in three years, which is exciting for both of us," Julia said.

She looks back fondly on her long teaching career, which she's pursued "from the time I was 22.

"I went to school for art," she recalled, "but I decided I didn't want to starve so I started looking into options."

Teaching clicked immediately. She loved working with young children.

"They're so eager and anxious to learn and know as much as they can know," she said.

Sweeton worked in Myrtle Creek for 10 years before making the move to Sisters. She says that she has always been grateful for "the love the community has for the school ... their desire to have Sisters be a great place. It made it an easy place to work."

Sweeton plans to do a bit of traveling when she gets to Australia. She wants to visit the Great Barrier Reef, experience the Outback and see Fraser Island, the largest sand island in the world.

Wherever her adventures take her, her fellow teachers at Sisters Elementary School, along with a generation and more of students and parents, wish her well.