BETHEL — Linda Olson’s experience as a special education technician at Telstar High School has been very satisfying, making her retirement this spring an emotional one.
“I like high school kids,” she said Thursday. “I like to watch them develop, and the relationship we build from freshman to senior year, watching them grow to be adults.
“I love making a connection and a relationship with each student. Kids can tear your heart apart, but they can also give you great joy.”
Olson said she has seen special education change, from segregated classrooms for those in need of additional support to today’s philosophy of mainstreaming as many students as possible. She accompanies one or more students to their regular classrooms to make sure they understand the assignments and to help them, if necessary.
She and the special education teacher also offer small group classes to provide additional support, or teach complete classes in such subjects as English and math with the goal of students eventually being able to enter regular classrooms.
Her departure in June will be the end of a 24-year career working at the high school in Bethel.
A native of New Haven, Conn., she and her husband, Neil, have lived in Bethel for 41 years. They met while students at a Connecticut college. He suggested they move to his hometown of Bethel for a couple of years, which they did, but they never left, she said.
They raised two daughters who graduated from Telstar High School. A stay-at-home mom as they were growing up, she said when she decided it was time to go to work, she thought about nursing or teaching.
Now she’s done the teaching and once she retires, she’s thinking she may volunteer in nursing homes or hospitals. She was a candy striper in the Yale/New Haven Hospital when she was a teenager, she said.
Her 96-year-old mother and other family members, as well as friends, still live in Connecticut and she hopes to see them more after retirement, she said.
She and her husband have a cottage in Wells and want to spend more time there, too, as well as with their three grandsons in Falmouth. She also wants to take piano lessons and “do whatever I want to do.”
Still, leaving the faculty, many of whom are her friends, will be tough.
When that first school bus passes her house next fall, she’ll have a good cry. “Then I’ll be all right,” she said. “I’ve been blessed.”
Supporting Sponsor for the Advertiser Democrat
Keeping communities informed by supporting local news. norwaysavings.bank
Comments are no longer available on this story