Miss Smith’s Primer : Love Drove the Kindergarten Teacher for 39 Years, and Love Forces Her to Retire to Care for Her Father

Miss Beverly Smith has finally taken a seat. She has just dismissed her class of 32 kindergartners, plus some little brothers and a sister, for the last time.

Each child had come up for a farewell hug of the full-body variety, and many had lavished her with gifts. It was getting to be a bit much on the emotional scale, yet Miss Smith comported herself with characteristic aplomb.

She told each of the children how much she was going to miss them (so much) and that she will come back and visit them in the first grade because if she didn’t she would miss them too much. The mothers snapping photographs were about to weep.

Now Miss Smith smiles rather meekly at me. She is stunned to be receiving the attention of the press at the end of her 39-year kindergarten teaching career. She has already explained to me about not being a limelight sort of person and expounded upon her (ridiculous) belief that the world is full of teachers such as herself.

In Miss Smith’s view, teachers everywhere have students whose parents call newspaper columnists to tell them about how wonderful they are and about what a difference they’ve made in their children’s lives and about how the quality of education (in the city, the state and the nation!) will undoubtedly be diminished by their departure.

Miss Smith, who is 60, teaches at James Monroe School in Fountain Valley. Or rather, she did. Oh, how that sounds! The past tense hurts.

“I’ve had such good, good fun in 39 years,” Miss Smith says. “But I’m going to cry.”

With that, Miss Smith walks to her desk and pulls out a tissue. And in walks the principal, Kathy Roe, to give her a hug.

“At least I didn’t do it in front of the kids,” Miss Smith says.

That’s all right. Mrs. Roe is weepy too.

And there’s more. No sooner had Miss Smith started to make up more excuses to the effect that she was nothing to write home about when in marched all of her former students still at Monroe School.

Each bore a carnation for her and, naturally, each got a hug.

The soundtrack went like this: “Oh, this is something! . . . Oh, I can’t believe it! . . . Oh, Paul! . . . Jennifer! . . . Sarah! . . . You’re so special too! . . . Oh, Noah! Everybody’s gotten so big! . . . Thank you, Rafi! . . . Of course I remember you. I remember everybody!”

And, you know, I believe that Miss Smith really does.

Where most people would see a pastiche of little faces, Miss Smith sees Individuals. Their skin color and their language might be different than her own, but that doesn’t matter. She teaches them that they are all Americans and that she, personally, loves them as her own.

And, incidentally, she considers herself “quite strict.”

“The children like that,” she says. “They like knowing what is expected of them.”

Miss Smith should know. By my count, she has taught some 1,170 kindergartners over the years, 25 of them at Monroe and 14 at a grade school in Compton. She taught the parents of three of this year’s students.

But, still, some will miss out. Bea Marshall, who has had three of her children pass through Miss Smith’s class, turns to mush when she thinks about her youngest child, who is 3. He won’t be coming home with all those exciting tales about the goings-on in Miss Smith’s class.

“Someone said to me, ‘If that one doesn’t turn out all right, we’ll know why,’ ” Mrs. Marshall says. This is a joke, but only sort of.

Mrs. Marshall goes on. “He needs her. We all need her. But we couldn’t convince her to stay.”

No, nobody could persuade Miss Smith to stay because she believes that, right now, her father needs her more than James Monroe School does. He is 83 and starting to forget things.

He doesn’t know that his daughter, who lives with him and their standard poodle, Nick, is giving up teaching for him. Miss Smith hasn’t told Daddy because he wouldn’t understand, and he probably wouldn’t approve.

He’s a proud man who worked construction all his life, and nothing made him more proud than when his daughter started earning more money than he ever could. He is her biggest fan.

Still, Miss Smith’s decision to devote herself full time to her father, to stimulate him as she has her students, is not one that can be summed up in simple black and white. She is doing what she believes is right, not out of a sense of obligation, but because of love.

This is how Miss Smith, who never married or had children of her own, has operated throughout her life. Ask anyone about that.

Parent Netha Harrell tells Miss Smith to her face, while holding her hand: “What you do makes a difference.”

Then she turns to me. “You know why I like this lady so much? I wish I had a kindergarten teacher like this.” Mrs. Harrell’s 5-year-old daughter, Vanessa, calls Miss Smith her “special friend.”

Shamala Sundar, 6, says that she’ll miss “learning stuff” from her kindergarten teacher, like the ABCs.

“I love Miss Smith,” Shamala says. And so does virtually everyone else.

But you probably already figured that out.

And even Miss Smith the limelight hater finally seems to be getting a clue. She says she knows that she still has much to give to the young lives who have always populated her own and that she wouldn’t be able to just cut them out.

So she figures that she’ll do a bit of substitute teaching and says that Carol Burkhart, the school’s other kindergarten teacher and Miss Smith’s pal, has invited her into her classroom anytime.

You know how that goes. The door is always open for people who want to give.