School alignment uproots teachers

By Lauren Radomski (Contact) | The Daily Journal

Published Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Mark Boen’s third grade classroom is full of stacked desks, scattered papers and the kinds of memorabilia only a teacher could appreciate. In one corner, a giant teddy bear sits atop a pile of chairs, while a nearby stretch of floor is home to a student-made banner from years past.

“This room was half full of boxes,” Boen said Tuesday, gesturing across the Cleveland Elementary classroom he moved into this week. “So it has really come a long way.”

Boen is among the many Fergus Falls teachers who’ve recently moved to different schools as part of the district’s new building plan. When school starts next week, all kindergarten classes and one to two sections of fourth graders will be housed in McKinley Elementary, while Adams Elementary will be the new home of first and second graders and Cleveland will host third and fourth graders.

Yet moving an entire classroom is no easy task, especially when a handful of teachers spent decades accumulating memories — and stuff — in one classroom.

Third grade teacher Vicki Hanneman taught at Adams for 21 years before moving into her new classroom at Cleveland. She began the moving process on last year’s first snow day, sorting, organizing and sometimes throwing the material she had kept over the course of her teaching career.

“I parted with things I had collected for 33 years,” she said.

Boen, who student taught at Cleveland in 1975, taught at Madison, Adams and Jefferson elementary schools before joining the McKinley staff in 1982. He, too, saw the move as an opportunity to go through a lifetime of teaching material, classroom supplies and miscellaneous knick-knacks.

“A move, you know, is a good way to clean stuff,” he said. “It’s also a good chance to see what you have again” and make the best use out of it. Once boxes were packed, Boen said, they were labeled with colored tags corresponding to different schools. Yellow-tagged boxes, for example, could be easily identified by movers as those belonging at Cleveland.

Hanneman said she didn’t feel sentimental about the move until the end of the school year, when she and her colleagues spent three student-less summer days packing up their classrooms. She cried at the time but now looks forward to the upcoming school year.

“There’s such excitement over here right now about what’s going to happen,” she said. “Everyone is going to be establishing new relationships, so we’re all in the same boat.”

Cherrie Mathieson, another long-time Fergus Falls teacher and recent Cleveland arrival, echoed similar sentiments.

“I think that I speak for most of our very flexible, creative and caring Fergus Falls elementary teachers,” she said. “We don't teach for money and comfort, we teach because we love it. We are a positive bunch.”

As Boen worked in his classroom Tuesday afternoon, preparing for the arrival of third graders and their parents at tonight’s open house, a former student stopped by to say hello. After a brief chat, Boen reiterated why he and his colleagues are so excited about getting their classrooms into ship-shape.

“It’s not the mess,” he said of his inspiration. “It’s not the boxes. It’s the students.”