PERU – Sandra Fuller feels blessed that she was assigned a corner classroom overlooking the mountains during her last year of teaching.

Fuller, a fourth-grade teacher at the new Dirigo Elementary School and a Dixfield native, is retiring from a 26-year career in education this June.

Eighteen of those were devoted to teaching elementary pupils in SAD 21. She graduated from Dixfield high School in 1964.

“The Lord has really blessed me with a wonderful teaching staff, administrators, parents and students,” she said in her neat, sunny classroom on the second floor. “I want to enjoy what time is left for me. I’m going to miss my family here – the staff – and my principal, Kathy Richard, who has been a sweetheart.”

Fuller began her elementary teaching career at a three-room school house in Locke Mills after her graduation from the University of Maine at Presque Isle in 1968. She originally planned to teach physical education, but she decided she wanted more interaction with children. She said she got a chance to teach physical education when she taught in Locke Mills because teachers did everything at that time.

She married Frank Keegan in 1968, and they lived in New Hampshire and Louisiana for a few years before returning to Maine where she taught in Canton and Jay. She also took about 10 years off to raise their three children.

When Keegan died in 1994, she returned to Dixfield, then married Steve Fuller, a surveyor with the Maine Department of Transportation, in 2000.

Fuller, 62, has many plans for retirement. She is caring for her mother, Carolyn Barton, and she and her husband, with the help of family and friends, plan to build a camp on land they own in Phillips. She loves the outdoors and enjoys logging, cross-country skiing, kayaking, perennial flower gardening and snowmobiling. She and other members of her family also have a camp on Worthley Pond where they often get together. She also plans to do volunteer work and visit her children and three grandchildren more often.

She said it’s hard to believe that her career is ending.

“I’ve always loved children and the challenge of finding out their needs and trying to meet them. It’s been a wonderful career,” she said.

Fuller is a member of the Dixfield Historical Society and the East Auburn Baptist Church.