Over the weekend, Taos lost a titan of our community when Cat Bennett, who taught Social Studies and Speech at Taos High School for over 30 years, passed away in her home.
Mrs. Bennett stands as an emblem of a bygone era of public education—a time when teachers settled down in one place and one school, in one position, and built programs that carried students to the heights of academic glory.
Among them were the Drama program built by Nancy and Ken Jenkins, the Science Fair program fostered by Ernie Lopez and Agapito Griego, and, of course, Cat Bennett’s Speech and Debate team.
Along with her beloved husband, Bill, Cat created a program that dominated at every level. From the 1980s to the mid-2000s, no school in New Mexico, not Los Alamos, not La Cueva, not even Albuquerque Academy, could match Taos’s Speech and Debate success. To quote the National Speech and Debate Association Hall of Fame (to which Mrs. Bennett was elected in 2010): “Mrs. Bennett’s spectacular achievements include coaching Team USA to victory at the 1994 World Debate Championship and coaching national champions in three divisions of Extemporaneous Speaking: Girls’ (1983), International (1986), and United States (2000). Ten different years she coached the student who was top NSDA point earner in New Mexico, including a second and a third in the nation. Cat’s squads won state championships too numerous to list. Mrs. Bennett qualified 90 students to the National Tournament and National Congress, including her daughter, Jasmine, who qualified in three different years.”
Cat’s dedication was simply unparalleled. She coached every afternoon for two hours after school. She drove kids to tournaments nearly every weekend, (and keep in mind S&D is a year-round activity). She gave up her summers to host Speech and Debate camps for kids across the country. She and Bill published debate briefs that were a staple of debate teams everywhere. She used the paltry Speech and Debate stipend, which should have been part of her salary, to purchase tickets to nationals for her students—no doubt a procurement violation that would get her fired today. Bill and Cat won most of the prizes in the fundraising raffles because they bought most of the tickets!
Her colleagues and friends will remember her for her passion and her fearlessness, her willingness to speak up, her singular focus on students. We will remember how she demanded that academic extra-curriculars like Debate should get the same focus and funding as sports. And we will remember her abiding love for her husband, whom she lost in 2020.
We will remember that she never truly gave up her love of the classroom—continuing to serve after retirement as a substitute teacher right up until a week ago, when she subbed for my AP Lit class.
To those of us who were her students (and there are many) she taught the ability to see more than one side of an issue, to support arguments with logic and citation, to differentiate between sources of good and poor quality, and to recognize the all-important difference between evidence and opinion. (Never mind the intros, transitions, and one-liners!)
But we will remember her by her wry smile and her sarcastic-yet-somehow-still-encouraging teaching style. We will remember her nasally laugh and her gravelly voice, always accented with the perfume of cigarette smoke. We will remember those harrowing late-night drives in the back of the “Green Monster,” and we will cherish forever the label of “Slacker-Losers” that she bestowed upon us all, and which really meant “I love you guys.”
So, Mrs. Bennet, be it resolved that Taosenos shall always remember you as one of our greatest educators. Of that there can be no debate.
-Francis Hahn