Rachel Shankles was born and raised in Newport, AR and received her BSE in Secondary Education at the UofA, Fayetteville. She says her family was made up of teachers and nurses and nursing wasn’t for her. While in NLR, she attained her Masters in School Counseling, also from the UofA. She began teaching at Sylvan Hills High School then moved to Hot Springs to become an English teacher at Lakeside High for many years before moving into the high school library after receiving a Masters in Library Science and Instructional Media from UCA. She and her husband Conrad live near Lake DeGray on Scenic Highway 7 South between Hot Springs and Arkadelphia on a farm that is the setting of her children’s books.
She retired in 2013 after 42 years in public school education (25 years in the LHS Library) and took a short break before beginning a new career as the Practicum Coordinator for the Library Media graduate students at UCA in the Dept. of Leadership Studies. She re - retired from there at the end of summer school in 2021, but her heart is still in the library world.
Rachel is one of the busiest so-called ‘retired’ people you would ever know because she is active in many things. She started writing children’s books with the help of her young grandchildren and has four books published so far, including the Triple S Farm Adventures series and McLain Street Gang about growing up in small town Arkansas.
Rachel has been involved with Alpha Delta Kappa since 1982. She has served in every office in her Alpha Epsilon Chapter, as state President and Corresponding Secretary, served as Regional Membership Consultant for two terms, served as International Vice President of the South Central Region of A∆K which includes Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Texas and Arkansas chapters for the 2021-2023 biennium. She has been chair of the World Understanding Committee and traveled to Haiti to the dedication of the T.E.A.C.H. project where a school was built at an orphanage. She has attended every International Convention and Regional Conference and presented at most since the 90’s. She is a mentor on Connect and a member of the 2023 Leadership Academy.
She served as the President of the Arkansas Library Association 2022 and was the chair of their all-virtual conference in October of that year. She recently received the Francis P. Neal Award from ArLA for a lifetime of exemplary service to libraries in Arkansas. And after receiving the Pat McDonald Award for Leadership from Arkansas Association of Instructional Media (AAIM) in April, she is now the official AAIM board Parliamentarian. She has been awarded the Life Membership Award, Herb Lawrence Award, the Media Program of the Year Award (twice) and the Media Specialist of the Year from AAIM and the Retta Patrick Award from ArLA in past years. Rachel was one of the first librarian tech gurus in Arkansas and built the first school-wide network; she recently built a web page for Garland County Retired Teachers and maintains the website for SCR.
Not much time is left for hobbies, but Rachel has many. She does tablescapes for holidays to share with the Beautiful Table Settings (BTS) group on Facebook. And she travels with her two daughters all over the world. During this pandemic she has become addicted to working 1000-piece jigsaw puzzles.
Rachel was a beginning librarian when she was elected a delegate to the Governor’s Conference on Libraries under Gov. Clinton. She was also in the first group of Resource Arkansas administered by the AR State Library to link multitype libraries in communities. She spoke before the AR Board of Education many times in two terms as AAIM President and as the School Library Division Chair in ArLA. One of her last library adventures before retiring was being in the group that began the AR Teen Book Award. She began the WeDewey group in Garland County of school librarians that still exits and is still very involved in all library things and groups in Arkansas.
She has been married to Conrad and they live in a hundred-year-old farmhouse near Lake DeGray on Scenic Highway 7 in Arkansas. Their Triple S Farm is the setting of her children’s book series.