R-I recognizes retiring educators, staff

After a delay because of the pandemic, the 2019-20 retiring staff from Poplar Bluff R-I Schools received recognition Thursday night.

The district had 16 staff members retire this year, including Gaelle Freer and Pamela Stucker.

Freer has been with the alternative school program, but is leaving right before it got its own campus at the Mark Twain School.

Meanwhile, Stucker retired just as the Early Childhood Center finished, which is the first time that age group has had a building designed for them.

Freer spent 19 of her 39 years of teaching with the R-I district. Prior, she worked in high school honors English at schools in New York and Key West, Florida.

Her husband is from the Poplar Bluff area and wanted to return home after he retired.

Retirement was out of the question for her at the time and after moving she interviewed for a position with R-I.

“(Then Superintendent Randy Winston) said ‘the only thing we have available is the alternative school,’” she said. “I said, ‘I’ll take it’ ... then I went home, and I drove my husband crazy for two months.”

Freer started with the high school program.

She said she was worried about making the change from honors students to the alternative school.

“Within two weeks, I’d fallen in love with them,” she said. “At an alternative school, they need you as a person to genuinely care about what happens to them.

“That’s not to say regular classroom teachers don’t, but regular classroom teachers have 130 students to deal with. They care about all of them, but they can’t always connect with all of them. In an alternative setting, you get to connect with all of them.”

Freer spent three years teaching at the Hentz Schoo1 off C Street, which is no longer there, before it closed, and they offered her a position at the high school teaching social studies.

After a year in that position, Freer said, she moved to the English department.

“I loved it,” she said. “I had a great time with it, and then the alternative school position opened. I said, ‘that’s really where I want to be. I want to be with those kids.’”

She’s been there ever since.

Over the years, Freer worked with alternative program students on three campuses.

When she returned to those students, the school was on Maud Street, she said, later moving to the Poplar Bluff Technical Career Center.

This year, the school moved to the Mark Twain campus off Main Street.

“I wasn’t moving again,” she laughed.

Freer said she liked the smaller class sizes, which came with the alternative program.

“We had, at most, 30 kids on our roster,” she said. “Being only 30 kids and there were three teachers, there’s no way anybody could get lost. There was no falling through the cracks.”

Freer said she is happy to see the school having more space and being able to expand to address the needs of the students.

“I just love when I see them (former students), and they’re out, and they’re doing productive things,” Freer said. “I think, ‘yeah, that’s a kid that nobody wanted to deal with. We dealt with them, and we made them successful and they’re on their path.’

“There is nothing better than feeling like you’ve made a difference in a child’s life.”

So far in retirement, Freer said, she’s been working on projects around the house, such as making masks for her extended family, cleaning out areas and helping her son move to Columbia.

“There’s no routine yet,” she said.

Stucker has been in a similar boat since retiring. Her hope is to travel, but with the pandemic, that’s on hold.

She got started with the early childhood program in 1990, only a few years after it began; first as a teacher assistant for a year before getting her own classroom.

Stucker majored in early childhood education in college in Colorado. While there, she could observe and work in schools around the area.

“I just fell in love with that age group and that learning everything,” she said.

When she got started with R-I, the early childhood students were at the Wheatley School, which is now a civil rights museum.

They later moved the students to the former Kinyon Elementary School on Vine Street.

Both buildings were old, Stucker said, and not built for students in that age group.

“Fire drills with 3-year-olds on stairs, not fun,” she said. “Everything had to be adapted or modified to fit that age of child.”

When the students moved to the Mark Twain campus, the challenge changed because there were three separate buildings to deal with rather than stairs.

The district opened the Early Childhood Center this year, which is the first building designed for that age group.

Stucker said part of her is a little sad that she left right before the facility opened.

“I think the silver lining in that was that I didn’t leave my classroom for somebody else for them to come in and create a new classroom,” she said. “I wouldn’t go back to that building like ‘that used to be my classroom, and now, it’s somebody else’s.’

“I’m very happy for the kids and very happy for the teachers that they got the new building. It’s safer and nicer.”