Next Thursday, the flag will be raised and lowered one last time, posters and murals will be stripped from the walls and students will clean out their desks.
No different, really, from any other last day of school, except for one thing: After 52 years, Rosslyn Heights Elementary is closing, a victim of budget cuts and low enrollment on Salt Lake City's east side.
Louise Bitner knows there will be tears in her classroom next week, and most of them won't come from her students.
"This is hard for me," she says, looking around her sunny classroom during her lunch hour last week. "I'm a real believer in neighborhood schools, where kids walk to class with their friends, everybody knows everybody and the school is the community gathering place. It's devastating to have it taken away."
Although Louise will return to her classroom next year while Rosslyn Heights is used as a transitional school during construction of a new Dilworth Elementary, all but four of her co-workers and many of the students won't be back.
"That's what hurts," she says. "The end of so many relationships. There's so much more to a school than the building. It's all about the lives that are touched inside." Because she has taught kindergarten and first grade at Rosslyn Heights for 32 years — longer than any teacher in the school's history — Louise felt it was important to share some of her memories. We sat in tiny chairs and talked over a Free Lunch of chicken salad in room No. 7, her second home for most of her 54 years.
"I was 22 when I started teaching, back when room mothers wore hats and gloves and merry-go-rounds weren't considered dangerous playground equipment," she says. "On the first day of kindergarten, everybody would cry. For most kids, it truly was the first day of school. Hardly any of them had been to preschool, so I was the first teacher they'd ever had."
Louise still remembers the names and faces of those students, and now she's teaching first-grade reading and math to many of their children.
A handmade sampler posted inside the door next to a black-and-white first-grade snapshot of Louise sums up her philosophy: "A teacher's task — take a bunch of live-wires and see that they are all well-grounded."
"Getting a new set of faces every year is always so exciting," she says. "It's kind of like getting a hand of cards. You have to take a close look to see what you've been dealt."
Louise estimates she has seen more than 1,000 new young faces in her classroom and she can tell you stories about almost all of them.
"At this age, they have such a delightful way of looking at things," she says, pulling out a note given to her years ago by a love-struck 6-year-old boy.
"You can come to my house ene tim (sic)," it says. "I lov you. You R my fend."
Then there's the boy who brought his mother's birth-control pill container to class for show and tell, announcing that he'd "found a new game." Or the girl who recently gave her a hug, loudly proclaiming, "I love you, Mrs. Bitner. You're beautiful and thin."
"What's not to love about that?" says Louise with a grin.
She will hold onto those memories when she says goodbye to her co-workers, friends and students at a farewell dinner party next week at the school.
"I'll always remember our school Halloween parades, the Friday assemblies, the support of all the parents who showed up to help in my classroom," she says. "The school is closing and it affects us all, terribly. But we'll always have our pictures and memories. Nobody can ever take that away," she says.
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