49 Years of Play
Two long-time teachers retire from Montview Community Preschool & Kindergarten
![Montview Retirees-Edie Buchanan-Credit Lisa Cozart](https://greaterparkhill.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/montview-retirees-edie-buchanan-credit-lisa-cozart.jpg?w=300)
By Maria Lucas, Trisha Pshak and Melissa G. Kroll
With big hugs and bigger smiles, family, friends, teachers and students past and present gathered at Montview Community Preschool & Kindergarten’s playground to wish their first and favorite teachers – Edie Buchanan (28 years) & Carolyn Hill (21 years) – a happy retirement.
“I came, I saw, I stayed,” teacher Carolyn Hill said about her time at Montview. She was first introduced to the program 23 years ago when her son attended preschool there. She said she simply fell in love with the school and his teacher, Edie Buchanan, and when he left for kindergarten, she decided to say.
For 21 years Carolyn Hill has taken on the “awesome responsibility and honor” that comes along with being a little one’s first teacher. “I hear ‘You’re the best teacher I’ve ever had!’ a lot, but that’s because I’m the only teacher they’ve ever had!”
All humbleness aside, Montview’s preschoolers love of school has started in Carolyn & Edie’s classrooms which are packed with paint, blocks, interlocking cubes, feathers, glitter, real hammers and nails, endless stacks of construction paper, hedgehogs, fish, hamsters and lots and lots of butterflies. They have taken the tiny hands of 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds and guided them into the world of education through play.
Over 20 years ago, a little boy was playing hospital in Edie’s classroom. He put the stethoscope to his teacher’s heart and said, “Edie, I hear the kids in your heart.” Not many things are sweeter, or truer than that.
If you ask Edie about herself, she turns the attention to the school, with a huge smile of love and pride. She feels it was a gift to teach at Montview, an inclusive, cooperative school where children are accepted as they are. She believes in the balance of open-ended and teacher directed activities. She quoted John Dewey when he said, “Knowing we cannot teach students everything, it is the most important we teach them to learn.” And in her own words, “We are building a foundation for learning at Montview and it’s fun!”
Carolyn and Edie, you will forever be in our hearts and we know that when we run into you on bike rides and trips to the grocery the grown children you taught will run up and say, “You’re the best teacher I ever had!”