June 1, 2006

Mills Lawn School teacher Pam Dapore, who is retiring after 35 years of service, is surrounded by sixth graders Andy Sherwood, left, Daniel Teuber and Austin Pence

By Diane Chiddister

Longtime Mills Lawn teacher Pam Dapore has two grown children, and both have chosen teaching as their career. When asked recently why her children have followed in her professional footsteps, Dapore was momentarily at a loss. Then she smiled and shrugged.

“I guess some of the joy came through,” she said.

At the end of this school year Dapore will retire from 40 years of teaching, 35 of which she spent at Mills Lawn.

In a recent interview, it was clear that after several decades in education, Dapore still feels great joy spending her days with children. She loves the open spirits of children, she said, and how they see life as full of possibilities.

“To children, everything is possible,” she said. “I couldn’t imagine a better job.”

What Dapore finds most gratifying is having former students come back and tell her that her class impacted their lives, she said. Just recently, Scott Bradley, a former student who now works in the Air Force Museum history department, served as a resource for her students’ study of medieval history. Bradley told Dapore that his interest in history was sparked by being in her class as a child.

Hearing that she made a difference in a student’s life, Dapore said, “makes everything worthwhile.”

While she has stayed for three and a half decades at Mills Lawn, her beginning at the school was less than auspicious, she said. A graduate of Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, Dapore had taught in Massachusetts for several years before moving in 1971 to the Dayton area for her husband’s job. She applied at Mills Lawn in that year and got a call to interview for a job the day before classes began. The school’s principal had unexpectedly died from a heart attack, and the school quickly reshuffled its staff, leaving a last-minute opening for a fourth- and fifth-grade teacher.

It didn’t take school employees long to decide that they wanted Dapore.

“I was interviewed at 8 a.m. and by 9 was part of a team meeting,” Dapore said. “I didn’t make it over to the board office to sign my contract until lunchtime.”

That last-minute beginning was the start of a professional partnership that lasted from 1971 until last spring, when Don Nowak retired after 34 years of teaching. During that time, Nowak and Dapore worked as a team, first with fourth- and fifth-graders, then with fifth and sixth. She couldn’t have asked for a better partner, Dapore said.

Many things have changed in her 35-year career, Dapore said. First, the numbers have changed: when she began in 1971, there were about 180 fourth and fifth graders, and now the fifth- and sixth-grade class has about 80 students. Rather than two teaching teams with 90 students each, the school has one fifth- and sixth-grade team, composed of Dapore, Jody Pettiford, Jeananne Turner-Smith, Ben Trumbull and Brandon Zappin. Dapore said she has appreciated “being part of a great teaching team.”

While the student numbers have decreased, the building size has increased, and the construction project two years ago resulted in additional classrooms plus new windows, doors and ceilings.

A significant change in teaching has been the ever-growing use of technology, and that trend has had mixed results, Dapore believes. Technology allows students to do more complex projects, and the projects’ standards tend to be higher, she said.

Technology “makes a lot more things possible,” she said, but it also adds to what Dapore sees as a growing pressure on children to constantly learn more specialized and highly technical skills.

“School used to be a more relaxed pace,” she said.

The most significant change in her career, and the one that she believes adds the most stress on children, is the pervasive presence of state testing, and the requirement that teachers link every class activity to state standards. Dapore said she misses some of the creative activities that she can no longer do, such as leading an archeological dig in which children in small groups created artifacts for fictional societies, then buried the artifacts in the yard for other students to dig up and attempt to understand.

While students seem to be doing well and have adapted to the increased testing, “they were also learning before we started testing them to death,” she said. “I have always felt I was trying to meet the needs of children.”

But Mills Lawn teachers still manage to make learning fun and interesting, said Dapore, and she feels especially proud of the school’s success in integrating the arts and science into the curriculum, with more artists-in-residence and scientists-in-residence in the past few years. She also believes that children have benefitted from an increased exposure to multicultural activities and projects that emphasize integration of many disciplines.

After she retires this summer, Dapore plans to spend time working on her home, on the edge of Fairborn, and also visiting her own children, who live in Florida and Japan. And she also looks forward to following in the footsteps of her former colleague Don Nowak and returning to Mills Lawn as a volunteer.

“I don’t plan to desert this place,” she said.

Contact: dchiddister@ysnews.com