A Class of Their Own: 3 Longtime Teachers Embark on Their Retirement
Lorna Robertson and Patti Fottrell
When the Avalon Stone Harbor Schools reopen for the 2022-23 school year, longtime familiar faculty faces will be elsewhere because of retirements.
Three teachers in three different fields retired in June: physical education and health teacher Patti Fottrell, first- and second-grade language arts teacher Lorna Robertson, and art teacher Jackie Farina.
Patti Fottrell
Patti Fottrell spent 35 years teaching local students how to stay healthy.
The Egg Harbor Township native was hired as the physical education teacher for grades 1-8 at Avalon Elementary School in 1987, within a year of graduating from Trenton State College (now The College of New Jersey). Fottrell later completed her master’s degree at Glassboro State College (now Rowan University). After the consolidation of the Avalon and Stone Harbor Elementary School districts in 2011-12, she taught middle schoolers in grades 5-8 and preschoolers at Avalon Elementary School.
Three concepts are incorporated into teaching physical education to younger children, Fottrell explains. They are movement exploration, simple games, and introduction of sports.
Movement exploration helps children to learn “how to move safely” and in coordination with other bodies in motion; in other words, “basic movements needed in life,” Fottrell notes.
Simple games are games played with minimum rules, games like tagging and fleeing,
Basic soccer, two-hand touch football and volleyball are generally the sports taught to younger students. Fottrell also introduced lesser-known sports like tchoukball, a handball-type game that Swiss biologist Hermann Brandt invented with injury prevention in mind.
Both the Avalon Board of Education and the superintendent of Avalon and Stone Harbor Schools were “open to ideas and extremely supportive of my program,” says Fottrell. Their support when she introduced the group game 9 Square in the Air was one example, she adds.
“I was blessed, very blessed,” Fottrell notes before mentioning how the board and superintendent provided yoga mats for every child “so that each student had safe space” in physical education classes when school reopened after COVID-19 lockdowns.
Teaching health became Fottrell’s responsibility in the last three years. Age-appropriate lessons stressed health and wellness, healthy eating, proper nutrition and the dangers of drugs and alcohol, Fottrell says. Preschoolers learned about appropriate touch and stranger danger.
One of her last health lessons focused on the importance of sun safety, “important especially at a shore town,” she says. “The children were very interested and very curious.”
As she moves on to the next chapter in her life, Fottrell says, “August feels different this year. I was always getting ready by now and looking for new games.
“But I am going to Paris on the first day of school!” she adds with delight of the trip she anticipates taking with five other retired teachers and their daughters.
Lorna Robertson
“Patti and I started together,” Lorna Robertson says of her friend and colleague. “We always said that we would retire together,” adds the Avalon Elementary School teacher who opened students’ eyes to the wonders of reading and more for 37 years.
After her 1980 graduation from Cedar Crest College in Allentown, Pa., Robertson taught kindergarten at Rose Tree Elementary School in Media, Pa., from 1980-88. During summers in the 1980s, she worked for the Avalon Department of Recreation as a swimming instructor and a scorekeeper at basketball games. This led to her relocation to South Jersey. The man she married, John Robertson, just happened to be an Avalon Rec basketball referee.
From 1988 through 2011, Robertson taught second-grade and sixth-grade classes at Avalon Elementary School. When the school districts consolidated, she taught first grade and then first and second grades at Stone Harbor Elementary School from 2011-22.
“It feels like one big family” at Avalon and Stone Harbor Schools, Robertson says of her time there. “You really get to know the children and their families.”
Robertson cannot hide her enthusiasm when she talks about teaching children to read. “It’s difficult,” she explains. “Lots of different strategies are applied. I worked to find the best combination of those strategies” based on the needs of each class, and each student who has his or her individual reading level. “You see the lightbulb go on when a child first comprehends reading,” Robertson recalls with delight.
The retired teacher, whose classroom was always dubbed “Bearadise,” made considerable efforts to inject fun into learning.
For more than 20 years, Robertson led her students in celebrating the 101st day of school with learning stations and more linked to the film “101 Dalmatians.” The children all dressed up as Dalmatians and their teacher transformed herself into the character Cruella De Vil.
Parents were “a huge help” that day and many others, Robertson says.
So as not to disappoint her students, Robertson came up with ways to celebrate the 101st day of school with her students online during COVID-19 lockdowns, costumes and all.
“COVID totally changed how I taught,” says Robertson.
After converting her home office to a classroom, Robertson tried to innovatively maintain routines as much as possible and made individual appointments to read with each of her more than 40 students. She also added a fun element to online learning.
Robertson sent each of her first-graders a “Flat Mrs. Robertson” so that they would take Flat Mrs. Robertson places and read to her. Their teacher based this assignment on the Flat Stanley Project in which a child sends a flat cut-out character, Flat Stanley, to a family member, a celebrity, a politician or others, and the recipient returns the little flat guy to the child along with pictures of him in his travels, a journal logging those travels and perhaps souvenirs.
“I went camping and did all sorts of things!” says Flat Mrs. Robertson.
In retirement, Robertson is not sure if she will return to privately tutoring students, as she has in the past. “I’m hoping to pick up some part-time work,” she says.
Jackie Farina
Jackie Farina has been teaching for 27 years. She spent 15 of those years encouraging local students to appreciate art and create artworks that would leave lasting impressions.
The Norristown, Pa., native graduated from Temple University’s Tyler School of Art when it was located in Elkins Park, Pa. She moved to South Jersey in the 1980s.
Farina first taught art to students enrolled in the Creative Achievement Academy, a nonprofit, private alternative high school in Vineland. “It was a challenge; many students were never exposed to any type of art,” Farina says. “They were busy dealing with big issues in their lives.” Despite that, her efforts to introduce the wonders of art to the high schoolers reaped rewards, she says. In exposing her CAA students to art and its positivity, some of them discovered “personal gifts that they never realized they had or were capable of having.”
When Farina made the move to teach at Avalon Elementary School in the late 2000s, she had other ideas for art lessons to suit her new pupils. “I did not do simple things. I wanted to challenge them,” she says of her Pre-K through eighth-grade students.
Over the years, Farina taught the children how to craft wood-burning pieces, pottery, clay vases and tiles. There’s a kiln at Avalon Elementary School that helped.
She also led Art Club members in creating sets for school shows.
“We did not rush” when working on a project, Farina says before explaining that her art classes met once a week for less than an hour. “But we accomplished a lot!” she adds cheerfully.
On some projects, “I made them think outside the classroom,” Farina says. During project planning, “I asked, ‘Would this coordinate with that room at home?’” So, it thrilled the art teacher to hear parents say that their children’s artwork was now part of their home décor.
Farina takes special pleasure in the results of particular projects involving the creation of tiles. Those tiles remain as part of the décor at Avalon Elementary School.
The Avalon Elementary School’s Science Room, Spanish Room and Language Arts Room each feature insulating ceiling panels made with tiles created by Farina’s art students. Plus, the wall mural under the Art Showcase in the school’s hallway displays rows of colorful Talavera clay tiles that students created every year.
Each child first chose a design for his or her tile, a design that incorporated traditional Spanish themes. The students had to be certain that their designs coordinated with previous years’ tiles as well as room design, color and décor.
“I wanted to leave something permanent reflecting the students at Avalon Elementary,” Farina muses. Her wish was fulfilled. When former students visit the school, they always want to see the tiles they created, or their siblings’ tiles, says the artist who felt it was more important to feature photographs of her students’ tile creations than one of herself with this story.
Much like those tiles, when teachers like Jackie Farina, Lorna Robertson and Patti Fottrell retire, their heartfelt dedication to their students leaves lasting marks as well.
