West Hernando teacher inspires sons to join her at Brooksville school

At West Hernando Middle School in Brooksville, Susan Jackson’s influence now reaches beyond her own classroom and into the next hallway. After 38 years teaching English language arts at 14325 Ken Austin Parkway, Jackson is now teaching alongside her sons, Adam and Brian Jackson, who both joined the school as 7th grade civics teachers.

The brothers did not come straight from college into education. Both had careers at Publix, where Adam Jackson worked in accounting and Brian Jackson worked in management, before deciding to switch paths after watching the fulfillment their mother found in working with students every day. The family connection became even more visible when the brothers helped surprise Susan Jackson in class, turning a school day into a reminder of how deeply the Jackson name is woven into the building.

That visibility matters at West Hernando Middle, a school with about 666 students and 38 classroom teachers in the 2024-2025 school year. The campus, which uses Bear Country branding and describes itself as a family-oriented learning community, also relies on a one-to-one Microsoft laptop program and classroom tools such as Promethean and Newline smartboards. Chris Healy is the current principal, and Hernando County School District later named him its 2026 Principal of the Year.

The school’s roots go back to West Hernando Junior High School, which opened for the 1980-81 school year on Fox Chapel Lane and Deltona Boulevard. In 1993, the school moved to its current Ken Austin Parkway location, keeping the same community tied to it through decades of growth in western Hernando County.

The Jackson story also lands in a subject area that matters statewide. Florida students study civics and government throughout public school, and 7th grade civics is part of the state’s Civics EOC framework. In that setting, Adam and Brian Jackson’s move into the classroom is more than a career change. It puts two former Publix employees into a core public-school subject at a campus where one veteran teacher’s example has now shaped the next generation.