Bittersweet sunset for 48-year teacher

The moment will be bittersweet when 48-year teacher Jan Stewart leaves her Second Grade classroom on Wednesday to take a retirement package that, she said, was urged upon her repeatedly by the city school district superintendent.

Stewart, 69, leaves her Hermosa View School classroom and its occupants – “the Blue Crew, in Room Number 2, on the top of the hill, at the school with a view” – after 45 years in the Hermosa district, some of them marked by disagreements with administrators.

“It’s sad, and it’s my loss. It’s been my whole life, and my love,” she said. “I’ve played with young folks so long, I don’t want to go play with the old folks.”

The school district is promoting early retirement packages for teachers to save money amid steep state budget cuts. Stewart said Superintendent Bruce Newlin approached her three times to ask her to retire, telling her the district could pay for “a couple of teaching positions” with the salary savings, because new hires make less money than veteran teachers.

Newlin was unavailable for comment.

As Stewart continued to fret over her issues with the district, fellow teachers began to urge her to retire as well, she said.

Stewart said some administrators objected to the clutter in her classroom, which is filled with five computers and a TV monitor, stuffed animals of many sizes, and desktop toys that put on light shows or demonstrate laws of motion. Below her feet was a carpet covered with shiny stick-on stars, and above her head, beach ball-sized planets, made by the kids, hung from the ceiling.

Standing front and center was a cardboard rocket ship large enough for kids to get inside, where they would find a mock spacesuit with a NASA shoulder patch, and a plastic space helmet. In one corner of the classroom a couch stands perpendicular to a wall to create a cozy library niche.

“It’s a kid’s world,” Stewart said.

She said she and the students used the internet to research lice in a defense of some of the larger stuffed animals that sit high atop a cupboard.

“We found out that you couldn’t get lice from them, because lice don’t have wings, they can’t fly, and they can’t crawl down here,” Stewart said.

This year, Stewart said, it was her turn to object, as the district adopted a teaching approach that will split first and second graders into three levels, based on their competence with the curriculum.

“It just doesn’t go with teaching. They’ll know, ‘you’re low, I’m high,’” Stewart said.

“I’ve got a mixed range of kids and we try to work together. I have my own program but it meets state standards,” she said. “They want a cookie cutter.”

Stewart said she also objects to the increased standardized testing that occupies more and more education time.

And she said she got sideways with two sets of parents, describing one incident in which she was yelled at by a mom in front of the students, and another in which police were called to assure order.

Parent and longtime resident Annie Seawright Newton called Stewart “one of the most creative and dedicated teachers around,” and noted how she “especially goes over the top for open house.”

Both of Seawright Newton’s kids have been Blue Crew in Room 2 students.

Stewart likes to drape her curriculum on the spine of science. In a whirlwind tour of her classroom on Monday, she showed how her students studied the core of the earth, then its surface, animals, people and environments before launching into space to explore all the way to Andromeda and beyond. Along the way they used reading, math, history and other disciplines to aid their understanding.

The room was chock full of the fanciful, ceiling-hung planets, dioramas of space tableau, written proposals for space exploration, and paper dolls wearing traditional clothing from around the world. One kid had made a looking glass, possibly made from a Pringles tube, which when held to the light revealed various constellations formed by tiny holes in caps that could be placed over one end of the tube.

Stewart paused to explain finer points of the Harry Potter paraphernalia that hung from a Nimbus 2000 broomstick overhead, opened drawers with funny hats and sunglasses, and described how the class picks up trash left by weekend visitors, allowing everyone to socialize before hitting the classroom.

Parent Michelle Balzer was hanging around the classroom after school, doing something with glue and construction paper while her daughter Malia and two other students played with some science-related toys. Balzer said kids regularly hang out after school, and when it was time to go she had to drag the kids away.

After Balzer’s son Shane had Ms. Stewart for second grade three years before, the younger Malia developed an ironclad certainty that she would land in Ms. Stewart’s class as well.

“I told her you can’t choose who you get,” Balzer said. But Malia paid no heed, and it worked out the way she predicted.

Although Stewart does not believe she is leaving the classroom on her own terms, she stressed her 48-year love affair with teaching.

The longtime Hermosa resident, a lifelong member Hermosa Beach Historical Society, started out in Redondo Beach and after three years came to the Hermosa district to stay, teaching kids from first to eight grades as she moved from the old South School to Valley School, and then to View.

On Wednesday, Stewart will say goodbye to the class of 2010 in her traditional style, reading a poem dedicated to the students and serving them sparkling apple juice relabeled Frobscottle, a beverage found in the books of children’s author Roald Dahl.

Stewart got a foretaste of how she will feel at this year’s open house, which was her last.

“It was hard to get through the open house and not cry,” she said. “When everyone was gone I just sat in the dark and reminisced. I’m going to miss it so much.” ER