HUNTINGTON BEACH : Students Dedicate Teacher’s Memorial

Marine View School students began their last day of the school year Thursday by saying goodby to a favorite teacher.

In memory of Rodney Collier, a Marine View teacher who died of skin cancer Jan. 9, about 280 seventh- and eighth-grade students joined faculty, district officials and relatives in dedicating a plaque and a newly planted tree to him.

Two of Collier’s students, who raised the money to buy the sapling and the memorial plaque, eulogized their teacher as a dedicated, compassionate role model who cared as much about his students as he did the environment.

The redbud tree is intended as a “living memorial” to the teacher, said Sue Hessel and Elethea Locke, who collected $250 from students to help pay for the memorial.

“This was really pleasing to see,” said Mary Collier, the teacher’s widow and a Marine View instructor. “It’s such an appropriate way to remember him. He was an avid gardener, environmentalist and outdoorsman, and this (tree) is symbolic of all the things he thought were important.”

After graduating with a bachelor’s degree from UC Santa Barbara in 1969, Collier earned a master’s degree in environmental education from San Francisco State University.

Collier, who died at age 42 after 17 years as an Ocean View School District teacher, had taught social studies in the Gifted and Talented Education program during his five years at Marine View. Teachers and relatives said he took students each year on field trips to Yosemite National Park and Washington and helped found the district’s Outdoor Education Program.

After his cancer caused by long-term exposure to the sun was diagnosed in February, 1989, and as he went through medical treatment to fight the disease, Collier warned students about the dangers of not keeping skin protected while outdoors. A letter he wrote about guarding against the potential harm caused by ultraviolet rays was published in the school newspaper.

Hessel and Locke, who had been students of Collier during their last two years at Marine View, said they had hoped to dedicate the tree on Earth Day in April. But when those plans fell through, they agreed that the last day of the 1989-90 school year would be the next best time.

“We thought this was sort of like an ending to the grief,” Locke said. “This is a closing of everything.”

She and Hessel said they raised the money by asking students, from kindergartners through eighth-graders, to each chip in a dollar for the tree-and-plaque fund. In addition to student donations, teachers and other staff members contributed another $100 for the memorial, Principal Bob Vouga said.

The plaque, which is set in the ground in front of the young tree, bears Collier’s name, along with the words of American naturalist and writer John Muir: “Happy the man to whom every tree is a friend. . . . Great as they are . . . we may carry them about with us in our hearts.”