By Lindsay Tice,Staff Writer
Marilyn Isaacson Simonds is praised as “a community mother” for her work to help children.

AUBURN – For more than 40 years, Marilyn Isaacson Simonds has quietly worked to improve the lives of children.

She taught preschoolers in Head Start and took troubled teenage girls home with her. She worked to help poor families, immigrant families and stressed families gain control of their lives.

She went about her days with little pay and few accolades, and that was fine. Simonds, an unassuming 77-year-old grandmother, called it “just my way of giving back.”

That wasn’t fine with the people who knew her.

This winter, their nomination helped earn Simonds the Lewis Hine Award, a national prize for children’s heroes.

“She’s a very much loved and depended-upon woman,” said Jeffery Newman, president of the National Child Labor Committee, which bestows the award every year. “She’s almost like a community mother.”

Kind, honest, gentle

Born and raised in Lewiston, Simonds attended the University of Maine and returned to the area with her husband to raise their three children.

In the mid-1960s, with her kids in school or off to college, she volunteered to work with mentally challenged children at a local school. That turned into a stint of tutoring, then a summer working with poor children in a new program at the time, Head Start.

Simonds, a psychology major in college, never had thought about teaching as a career. But she was good with children – kind, honest, gentle- and a local education leader asked her to step into the classroom.

Simonds agreed with little hesitation.

She taught for several years in local public schools and helped start a day program for special needs children. She became a Head Start teacher in the 1970s and quickly discovered she could help poor preschool children academically, socially and emotionally through the program. She did that, in part, by getting to know the whole family.

“If I could make some impact in a child’s life, this would be my way of giving back,” she said.

Soon, Simonds expanded her reach. She mentored other teachers, helped out at a shelter for battered women and worked with troubled teenage girls, including two she took to live with her in Auburn.

In recent years, after retiring from Head Start, she joined one board after another to advocate for children. In her spare time, she volunteered to read to elementary school students and teach English to immigrants.

“Children are in school because they have to be. People at ESL (English as a Second Language) are there because they want to learn,” she said. “It’s very rewarding. I look forward to it.”

Except for her time teaching at Head Start, most of Simonds’ work has been as an unpaid volunteer.

National recognition

Pam Beliveau, vice-chairwoman of the Head Start Board of Directors, thought Simonds deserved more. With the help of friends and co-workers, she wrote to the National Child Labor Committee and nominated Simonds for the Lewis Hine Award, an honor named after a 20th century photographer whose work publicized the atrocities of child labor. The 10 annual awards go to outstanding child and family advocates throughout the country. Simonds is the only New Englander on this year’s list of honorees.

“She’s just such a beautiful person. She’s been working in this community so quietly, tending to the neediest children and families in our midst,” Beliveau said.

The committee received about 225 nominations from governors, nonprofit leaders and CEOs. Judges chose Simonds a couple of months ago.

She didn’t know she’d been nominated.

“I was dumbfounded. When you’re involved in something, you give it your all and then you move on to something else,” Simonds said. “You don’t think about it.”

She flew to New York with her family to receive the award at the end of January. The honor came with a $1,000 check.

Simonds immediately decided not to spend a penny of it on herself. The prize will be divided among Head Start, UNICEF and the Boys and Girls Club.

It’s only right, she said. “That will go back and be used for children.”