Andrea Johnson/MDN Harry Summers has taught for 29 years at Roosevelt Elementary. She is retiring but will become the Roosevelt School grandma.

After 29 years, Roosevelt Elementary teacher Harry Summers has taught her last group of first-graders.

It was a hard decision, one she prayed and cried over and wavered over from day to day.

“I finally came to the point where I do think I’ve made the right choice,” said Summers, who still plans to remain connected to Roosevelt by becoming the Roosevelt school grandmother next school year.

“I’m looking forward to it,” said Summers. “That will keep me connected to the school that I love and the kids that I love and the staff that I love and still give me freedom.”

Summers and her husband, Tim, have three children, seven grandchildren and soon to be five great-grandchildren. Summers said she hopes to spend a bit of time traveling and also to spend more time with her family.

Unlike the traditional first-year teacher, Summers had a lot of life experience from raising her own children and serving as a leader of Girl Scouts and Cub Scouts and at Sunday school, being a member of the McKinley School PTA and having worked at other jobs before she first walked into her first grade classroom.

“I’ve done lots of things,” she said. “I’ve done bookkeeping and bartending and accounting and waitressing and daycare and yes, many things … I always wanted to be a teacher. It’s something that I always aspired to and it took me 20 years to get my degree because I would go back to school when money and kids allowed me to. I finally got to the point where I knew that I needed to finish so then I went back for the last about two years and finished up my degree.”

After she had finished her degree at Minot State University, she went on to work as a substitute teacher, then a Title I teacher at the former Jefferson Elementary, and then a first grade teacher when the position at Roosevelt opened in October 1990.

“I think it made it a little easier for me because I had more experience with kids, first of all, and the life experiences that I had let me empathize better with some of the parents,” she said. “It was harder for me because I was a bit older … I wasn’t the cute, pretty little thing at my interview. I was the one wearing the one dress that I owned! I think in the end it probably was more beneficial because of the experience I had.”

She did her student teaching at Roosevelt with older children but has always enjoyed working with the first-graders and passed up chances she had to teach a different grade.

“I always felt like first grade is where you set your educational career. It’s where one sets the tone for a student’s whole educational lifetime, and so I always looked at first grade as being very important and then when I got the first-grade position and started addressing that, I couldn’t see me anywhere else,” said Summers.

Teaching this last group of first-graders this school year has been special for Summers too.

“I love being part of their moment of recognition of knowing that they know something new,” she said. “It’s exciting to see them go, ‘Oh, yeah, I do know how to do that. I can do that.’ It’s wonderful.”

She said far more is expected of students now than when she first started teaching. Kindergarteners are expected to learn what first-graders once were taught and she taught her first-graders skills that third-graders were learning when she first started teaching. Sometimes she thinks that kids don’t get enough time to simply be little kids.

But her young students have come a long way in their learning from the first day of school in August.

“My kids have done wonderfully with improving their reading and their math skills, and it’s very rewarding and just kind of magical because you work so hard at doing everything and getting through the curriculum and addressing all the needs that are so wide and varied and then you kind of stop and take a little breath and look at what you’ve done and it’s really something,” she said.

(Prairie Profile is a weekly feature profiling interesting people in our region. We welcome suggestions from our readers. Call Editor Mike Sasser at 857-1959 or Regional Editor Eloise Ogden at 857-1944. Either can be reached at 1-800-735-3229. You also can send email suggestions to msasser@minotdailynews.com.)