Kindergartners Never Outgrew Their Teacher : Education: Hundreds of ‘children’ ages 7 to 31 gather at Gardena school to honor the woman who helped shape their future on her 25th anniversary of teaching.

Quiet down boys and girls. It’s story time.

This tale takes place in a city called Gardena and in a school named Cavalry Baptist. It’s about compassion and love and victory. It’s also about adults returning to kindergarten 25 years after they left.

The main character is a teacher named Dorie Howell.

Most people do not remember their kindergarten days. They do not recall lessons, classmates or even the teacher.

But many of the 800, or so, students Howell has taught in the last 25 years at Cavalry Baptist School do not forget. This weekend, several hundred of them--ranging in age from 7 to 31--gathered at a 25th anniversary bash for Howell at the Eagle Club in Redondo Beach.

Howell, 54, dreamed up the idea for a massive reunion party while battling ovarian cancer in 1988. She’s now back in the classroom, her cancer in remission, and another of her dreams has come true.

“I always sit and dream about my kids and wonder what they’re doing,” Howell said. “I’m like a mother. They leave, but they don’t leave my heart.”

Howell, who has no children of her own, lingers in the hearts and minds of her former pupils, too.

“She has a way with children,” said Vicki White, 25, of Torrance, who met two old kindergarten friends at the party. “She knows how to talk to a 5-year-old. She’s not afraid to get down on the ground, look you in the eye and talk just like you do.”

Jeanine Burkeman-Rivers, 25, who flew in from Oregon, said she is amazed that Howell still remembers her former students by name--decades after they left her classroom.

“And that’s not all,” she said. “She remembers things like bows you used to wear in your hair and the day you wouldn’t stop crying.”

Howell’s party was a regressive affair, during which men and women who had gone on to such careers as doctors and real estate agents and aerospace engineers were singing “I’m a Little Teapot” on stage, while members of the Class of 1990 laughed in the audience.

Throughout, Howell used kindergarten-speak to adults and children alike.

“That’s a star on your chart,” she told one man in his late 20s who remembered the lyrics to an age-old song.

“Sit down,” she warned another grown former student, who instantly sank into her seat.

In conversation, all of Howell’s former students, whether burly men in suits or pint-sized girls in pigtails, are her “kids.”

Decades have passed since many last saw Howell at the chalkboard, but during an adult version of show-and-tell, they reminisced about that special year.

Carren Downs, 25, from the Class of 1969, remembered when her classmates pitched in their allowance money to pay the veterinarian’s bill for Howell’s hamster, named Levy.

Other students recalled the Christmas ornaments they made, the circus game they played and the apple juice and graham crackers at snack time.

For some, the memories were hazier.

“To be honest, I don’t remember kindergarten real well,” said Steve Clark, 30, a resident in surgery at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center. “But I do remember Miss Howell.”