Teachers' After Hours

As elementary school students grab their rolling backpacks and prepare to go home, they see their teachers huddled at their desks and imagine the secret bedroom hidden behind the classroom where they undoubtedly retreat to every night. In middle school, the newly acquired knowledge that teachers in fact do not sleep at school also comes with the terrifying fear of spotting them off campus. By high school, most students are relatively friendly with their teachers but despite this amiability, most students are still in the dark about what their teachers do when the classroom lights shut off.

All around Samo there are teachers with unknown hobbies and talents, Advanced Placement (AP) Government teacher Rose Ann Salumbides is just one example of a staff member who lives a different life after the last bell rings.

In 2013 Salumbides launched her wood eyewear company Siempre Verde (“Always Green”), but her journey to becoming an entrepreneur began much before that. Despite having majored in government and being in her 20th year of teaching, she has always had small businesses on the side. This one happened to take off.

Siempre Verde sells all-wood (bamboo, zebra wood, ebony) prescription sunglasses and eyeglasses. The lenses are manufactured overseas with tags made in Romania and leather cases made in Portugal.

“We use all sustainable wood and for every pair of eyeglasses we sell, we make a donation to American Forest and plant a tree,” Salumbides said.

Salumbides’ inspiration for her company began when she was on vacation with her family and her husband lost his very expensive pair of glasses.

“We found some glasses that were plastic but they looked like wood and everywhere we went people would stop him and say ‘those are so cool, are they wood?’” Salumbides said. “So I started doing some research and there are some [wood lenses] out there, but they are really expensive and so I thought, I bet you I could do those in a different price [range].”

One of the main goals of the company is to provide good quality lenses for an affordable price. So, while most wood lenses available cost between 500 and 800 dollars, Siempre Verde offers a similar product for around 180 dollars. Another unique aspect of its product is the fact that they are able to put prescription in its wood frames.

According to Salumbides, she has always been very interested in fashion, when she began developing this idea in 2012, she was determined to realize her vision. She found a company to make a prototype for her product and has been designing the polarized lenses ever since. When she won the CountMeIn contest for women entrepreneurs that provided her with a nine month business coach whose goal is to help the business keep growing, she began to create a solid plan to successfully execute her idea.

There is no denying that financing, designing, marketing and everything else that comes with owning a small business takes an extensive amount of time. According to Salumbides, she has a social media team and a marketing team who help her with a lot of her work.

“I have a really good team that does most of the work for me,” Salumbides said. “So I just need to plan it out. I use my summers and winter vacations really well.”

According to Salumbides, in order to balance teaching and owning a business, she plans everything ahead of time, sets everything for the year up in the summer and sends emails and goes to meetings on the weekends.

“I am really organized, I have very strict schedules. I do most of my work here at school. I am at school everyday until about 4:30 working,” Salumbides said.

Although over the years most of us have busted the various myths we have heard about out teachers, we are still blind to the fact that some teachers have completely different lives outside of the classroom -- Mrs. Salumbides being just one example."I first heard about her business through some friends, and checked out the webpage. I thought it was really cool that someone who already put so much time and effort into her job as a teacher would endeavor to have a small business on the side," Catleya Sherbow ('14) said. "I have a lot of respect for her, because she only seems to do things she is passionate about, and she does them well."