Commentary : Teacher’s Life of Service Provided Lesson for Everyone

The newspaper headline starkly announced that a teacher had shot herself. A journalistic decision had been made by the community paper to blazon the news in boldface across four columns of print, dwarfing the scant copy that followed.

As the newspaper dutifully informed the public of the suicide, readers learned the facts, such as powder burns were discovered “on the dead woman’s hands” and that she had left no suicide note behind.

But the newspaper could not capture the essence of the victim, or recognize her myriad gifts and achievements. Sadly, the readers would never know of the creativity that had once flowed from those hands, or the wealth of inspiration and love that she left behind.

In covering the facts, the newspaper had failed to uncover the person. The community would never realize its loss of an exemplary educator and a remarkable friend.

Dr. Maureen Omohundro spent the 18 years of her professional life as a reading specialist and a classroom teacher with the Chula Vista City School District before her untimely death June 18 at the age of 40. She had taught at several elementary schools within the district, but it is at Rohr Elementary School, where she had been for the last 10 years, that I was touched with the special qualities of her being.

It is not a simple task to reveal the dimensions of Maureen in writing, a medium that cannot duplicate her gravelly laugh or feel the whirl of her vivacity. The easy part is to list her professional accomplishments, credentials she gathered like flowers through the years.

Augmenting her teaching credential, she had earned a Pupil Personnel Service Credential, Administrative Credential, Specialist Credential in Reading, Community College Instructor Credential, Master’s Degree in Education, and a Doctor’s Degree in Psychology. Her expertise was highly regarded, yet her modesty caused few of her colleagues to know the true extent of her credentialed laurels.

Beyond her classroom teaching, Maureen also provided in-service meetings to teachers throughout the district, demonstrating effective reading instruction and classroom manipulatives that she had created. Her games and materials clearly reflected her belief that children should participate actively in their learning. She brightened the teaching methodologies of many over the years, as she sought to make education enjoyable for children.

She wanted learning to be meaningful, rather than mundane.

Maureen taught all her reading groups lying on the floor. As a reading specialist, her days were spent instructing small groups of primary grade children who needed extra help learning to read. They would enter her little room and cheerfully spend a half hour sprawled on the floor with her, surrounded with her hands-on materials.

She insisted on being near her students, hugging them and encouraging them as they learned. It never mattered that she wore only dresses and nylons to school, nor did she mind who might come through to observe her teaching. Principals, district personnel and board members alike just learned to quietly step over Maureen and her children.

It is to her credit to say that children simply loved her. She could not walk across the campus without children calling to her, running to give her hugs. Her visits in my classroom would prompt spontaneous outbursts of greetings from my students and a flurry of scribbled “I love you” notes. As Maureen had once touched their learning, she continued to touch their lives, long after they needed to visit her reading room.

I only saw Maureen cry once. She had selected one of my students from her reading groups to be recognized at a quarterly school honors assembly. The child had never been cited before, and she came to Maureen in tears after the assembly to thank her for choosing her. As Maureen held her, the tears rolled down her own cheeks. The child’s gratitude had deeply touched her.

With no children of her own, the children of others were the beneficiaries of Maureen’s love. She doted upon the children of her friends, remembering their birthdays and accomplishments with gifts.

At a family celebration honoring the completion of her doctoral degree, Maureen met each child at the door, on her knees, with a hug. She then led them down the hallway to the den, where she presented each one with a wrapped present, containing special books and activities she had selected for the child’s age and interests. Spared the boredom of an adult affair by Maureen’s sensitivity, the children enjoyed their stay, busily reading and constructing on the patio.

Actually, that is a gift that Maureen had for all who knew her, the part that is hard to describe. She seemed to intuitively know the needs of others, and she would reach out with cards, trinkets, hugs and her zany sense of humor.

I once needed 30 empty ice cream buckets from Baskin-Robbins for a class project, a collection that would have required several trips to several stores over several days to amass. The next day my class door opened and 30 kindergartners streamed into my room, each carrying a bucket gathered by Maureen. Her explanation was that my afternoons should be spent with my own children rather than driving all over town.

Maureen was a friend unlike any I have known before and probably will ever know again. In sharing her love, she rarely acknowledged her own concerns, hiding them under the shroud of her intense personal privacy. It is now too late that we are finally aware of the darkness she was feeling inside.

The difficulty for those of us who loved her is the untangling of the shadows that drove her to end her own life, the legacy always left to those on the periphery of suicide. A certainty we have is that Maureen loved her friends and her work, a small degree of comfort during a time of paralyzing grief.

Teaching did not drive her to her despondency, for it provided the illumination she needed to cope with her troubled personal life, one burdened with sorrows such as her unhappy marriage. We will never fully know the psychic shrapnel that she suffered, but we will always wish that we had.

It is important, though, that Maureen is remembered by the community for her contributions to the education of its children, for the joyful learning she caused in its young. She epitomized the excellence that the teaching profession is seeking, and she possessed the magic that made it work.

As for the others of us, her friends and students, we will simply remember Maureen’s laughter and her love. After all, we know she would not have wanted it to be any other way.