Co-working couples find love adds up

When Hoover High students find out that math teachers John and Debbie Henley are married, sometimes they have questions.

“Isn’t that illegal?” Debbie Henley said one student has asked.

The Henleys are Lake Crest residents and have been married 30 years. John Henley has taught at Hoover for 15 years, and Debbie has taught there for 11.

The Henleys and Frank and Melinda Lopez, who work together for the city of Hoover, both agree that life looks a little different — in the office and at home — when you share a workplace.

Frank and Melinda Lopez

It isn’t obvious at first sight that Frank and Melinda Lopez are married.

“People laugh, but at City Council meetings, he always sits on one side of the room, I sit on the other,” Melinda Lopez said.

Melinda is the city’s chief financial and information officer, and Frank is Hoover’s director of revenue and taxation. The Riverchase residents tend to work on opposite sides of the municipal budget process: he is responsible for bringing in tax revenue and auditing businesses, while she oversees decisions on how the city’s money is spent. They agree that keeping their office relationship professional is key to why it works.

“That’s the beauty of it, [I’m] treated just like everybody else. I like that,” Frank Lopez said. “You’ve got to have rules when you work together.”

The Lopezes met in 1996 when Melinda was interning for the city of Birmingham’s legal department and Frank was working for the finance department. He showed her around the finance department one day, but they didn’t meet again until Frank came to work for Hoover and Melinda, by happenstance, got an internship there as well.

They got married in 2002, and Frank Lopez’s five children were the wedding party. The day after the wedding, they packed up four of the kids and traveled to a conference that Melinda Lopez was attending.

“I always say I’m married, and I have five kids I didn’t birth,” she said.

One of their children, Wesley, recently began working in the Hoover Police Department’s detention center.

Since their departments are separate, most of their interaction at work takes place over the phone. Sometimes Melinda Lopez’s job requires late hours, but the couple accommodates that.

“She works a lot of hours here, and that doesn’t bother me at all,” Frank Lopez said. “If she’s not home a couple of times, at 7 o’clock, 7:30, I call and bring a pizza up here, and she’s working and we’re eating pizza. It’s kind of a fun, different thing.”

When they are at home, though, the city of Hoover is not the topic of conversation.

“A lot of people don’t realize that we have a home life, and we don’t sit around and talk about the city of Hoover,” Frank Lopez said. “We pretty much put that aside when we get home.”

Melinda Lopez said there’s a comfort level that comes with working with her husband that allows her to be herself.

“How she is here at work is how she is here at home,” Frank Lopez said. “And I love it, because you always know where Melinda stands.”

“I always tell people he’s the nicer half,” she said with a laugh.

Each loves the job they have, and Frank Lopez said knowing his spouse has a good workplace is an added benefit.

“It’s like a family. So then it becomes like an extended family. Even though we’re a family, everybody else here is as well,” Melinda Lopez said.

John and Debbie Henley

The family environment at Hoover High is critical for the Henleys as well. That became particularly clear during the 2016-17 school year, when John Henley was diagnosed with colon cancer.

“They really took care of us, this school did,” Debbie Henley said.

Through 12 rounds of chemotherapy, multiple surgeries and complications, some of which were nearly fatal, Debbie Henley said the students and faculty at Hoover High were there for her family. They brought meals, mowed lawns, wrote cards and helped with little tasks like running off copies for each day’s classes.

Debbie Henley said they have “a lot more thankfulness for knowing there was a community that was praying for us and helping us without us even asking. We knew we were taken care of.”

John Henley finished treatment in spring 2017, and Debbie Henley said she loves being able to say that his battle with cancer was “last year.” Now that they’re both back at school full-time, being right down the hall from each other has an extra benefit.

“It’s been nice for a whole different reason this year,” John Henley said. “I’m secure in knowing Debbie’s down the hallway just in case.”

Outside their math classrooms, John and Debbie Henley can be found together at plays, tennis matches, art shows and taking goofy prom pictures, all to support their students.

“We try to show up to everything,” Debbie Henley said.

The couple met at Auburn and married soon after. John was an engineer and Debbie was a stay-at-home mother, but after a few years John decided he wanted to teach. His 23-year education career included teaching at Simmons Middle, Huffman High, Hewitt-Trussville Middle and Bumpus Middle before coming to Hoover High to help create the engineering academy.

Debbie Henley had a math education degree but came into her job at Hoover High by chance. She was at the school to pick up her daughter when her husband, knowing the school had a math vacancy to fill a few days before the start of the school year, suggested that the principal hire her. The temporary position quickly became a permanent one.

The Henleys don’t drive to school together because Debbie has an early class, but they eat lunches together this year and know they have someone to turn to for advice or ideas.

“It’s nice that we have that much in common,” Debbie Henley said. “I like coming to school and knowing he’s down there.”

Their work often comes home with them.

“We do talk about math at home. We work problems together and talk about what worked and what didn’t work, and ideas for how to help students that are struggling,” Debbie Henley said.

John Henley describes himself as the mean teacher, while Debbie is the nice one. On the other hand, Debbie Henley said her husband often has students come back to thank him for how his class prepared them for college. 

This school year, the Henleys have had to adjust both to life after completing cancer treatment and to being empty-nesters, as their youngest daughter is now a freshman at Auburn. But their enjoyment of working together is the same as it has been for the past 11 years.

“We love hanging out together,” Debbie Henley said.