Full circle
Recently, Karen Wood came across a photo from 1984, the beginning of her career in education as a practice teacher for second graders at Vestavia Hills East Elementary.
She’s come full circle, the longtime Birmingham-based educator realized.
Wood, who retired two years ago, didn’t waste even a month before finding her way right back to what she said she loves best — “being in the classroom with her kids” — and right back where she started.
“I knew I wanted to do something,” she said. “I didn’t want to just sit at home, and I was trying to figure out where my talents lay so I could be of service to someone else.”
Wood taught kindergarten through fourth grade for the majority of her career, and even though her former principals wanted to see her talents at the state-level, she said she put it off for a while so she could continue working directly with students in early education. Wood then spent the last 10 years of her education career training other teachers on how to smoothly implement new standards and methodology through the Alabama Math, Science, and Technology Initiative (AMSTI).
“I really enjoyed spending time with children. [They are] my first love,” Wood said. “It took me a long time to get out of the classroom.”
Wood said she knew the stress and strain of trying to meet the needs of all the children in a classroom and wanted to be an extra set of hands.
Since her oldest granddaughter, Anne Fulton, lives in Vestavia and was starting kindergarten at VHEE, she decided to talk to Principal Mark Richardson about setting up some volunteer time two days a week.
“When her granddaughter started here, she approached us wanting to volunteer,” Richardson said. “I thought she was more or less thinking of helping out in her granddaughter’s room.”
Wood, who Richardson said has a “wonderful, patient spirit,” was willing to work wherever she was needed.
“I just felt like I was blessed so much throughout my career with so many different ways by so many different people, and when I retired, I knew I wanted to give back somehow,” Wood said.
As she began to work with her granddaughter’s kindergarten teacher Blair Dorman, she found herself working one-on-one with children who needed more attention or an extra challenge here or there. The first few years in school, Wood said, are always a critical time for development, so she even did one-on-one assessments with the students to give Dorman more information.
Wood said she tried to help the teachers by bringing her K-4 expertise to the table and add another viewpoint, especially for some of the strategies she previously worked on with other teachers in reading, math and science. In addition to her experiences in a classroom, she was a reading coach for about two years and has a math and science teaching specialization.
She said she loves being able to work directly with students again through volunteering.
“I missed my kids,” Wood said. “They’re just special at that age, and so is spending time with them.”
Plus, she gets to have lunch with her granddaughter every day.
“Right now, [my granddaughter] loves it,” she said.
Over the course of that first year, she eventually started working for some of the other kindergarten teachers, spending quality time with groups of students to go over skill sets and often volunteering more than just two days.
“Other teachers became savvy about her wonderful wealth of experience … before you knew it, they were utilizing her expertise up and down the kindergarten hallway,” Richardson said.
Towards the end of the year, she focused her time on organizing some special days for the kids, including a safari day where parents helped run various stations with different animals.
“She still just has such a passion,” Assistant Principal Cindy Echols said. “Literally, I don’t know if she missed a day [in the last two years] … she did a variety of things that were over and above the volunteering she signed up for.”
In the 2017-18 school year, Wood’s second year volunteering, Anne was placed in first grade teacher Ashley Williams’ class and Wood continued to volunteer regularly.
The experience she brought to the classroom, Williams said, was “priceless.”
“She became a grandmother to the whole class and showered attention on each student,” Williams said. The students looked forward to the days she was volunteering because of her constant encouragement and the time she spent giving them specialized learning.
Wood also taught workshops, Richardson said, to the kindergarten teachers on a strategy called Counting Collections, and then helped the first grade teachers learn a new AMSTI kit.
Wood’s contributions to the VHEE classrooms didn’t go unnoticed, either.
Last May, Richardson and Echols honored Wood’s service by presenting her with the Volunteer of the Year Award. It isn’t an annual award, Richardson said, but given out sporadically over the years to community members who come in to VHEE on their own time and “give selflessly to the school.”
“We just give [the award] out when someone really jumps out as really special and is tirelessly working to help us,” Richardson said. “This wasn’t a send off, this was just the beginning, and we just wanted to recognize her for that.”
“The thing that’s so impressive is that she’s not doing it for anything but her gratification of helping others. She’s not being paid for it … She was like, ‘I don’t need an award,’” Richardson said. “She’s a humble spirit with a gift, and she’s wanting to share it.”
Even during this past June and July, Echols said, Wood has been coming up to the school to talk over some tentative plans she has to launch a science and art camp the next summer.
“She’s putting together some ideas and using science standards to make an enrichment camp for the kids … She does everything,” Echols said.
Wood, who plans to continue volunteering in the upcoming years, said she will probably be back in kindergarten again when her other granddaughter, Caroline, enters VHEE for the 2019-20 school year.
“I will stay there as long as I’m needed and able,” Wood said, “even after my grandchildren get past this age.”