School is OUT for MLSD retiree

MOSES LAKE — Joan Dopps said her career as a second grade teacher started with a visit to her former second grade teacher.

“I went through many different bouts of ‘what am I going to do.’ I worked a year in a bank; I got an AA degree from Big Bend,” she said. “I went to visit (her former teacher) in California. And then I came back home and quit the bank, commuted to Ellensburg and became a teacher.”

Dopps retired at the end of the 2022-23 school year after 43 years in the classroom, all of them at Peninsula Elementary, all of them teaching second grade and most of them in Room 6.

“I started teaching when there were two landlines in Peninsula, there were no computers,” she said. “We had a very conservative, stern principal my first two years. You literally had to ask for a paper clip.

“So yeah, times have changed in my 43 years,” she said.

Yet for Joan Dopps it’s never gotten old.

“What kept me in it was that every year was a new job. Every year of teaching, you have to say goodbye, you have a break during the summer and then you have a new class. Every year is different,” she said. “Curriculum is different, the kids are different, the people you work with are different.”

Along with that Peninsula Elementary was a good place to work, with teachers and support staff that worked together, she said.

“You have good coworkers, you stick around,” she said. “The principals don’t matter as much as the coworkers. That’s my theory.”

Dopps started teaching second grade in the fall of 1980, when one wing at Peninsula was being rebuilt after it was destroyed by fire. She moved into her classroom in the spring of 1981. Her students relocated temporarily during remodeling in the mid-1990s, and schools were required to provide remote instruction from March 2020 to the end of the school year. Other than that she’s been in the same classroom her entire career.

Some of her friends totaled up some statistics during a retirement party the week before school was dismissed. The results were more than 1,000 students and seven principals.

Originally she didn’t plan to teach second grade, she said. Originally she was going to teach third grade.

“But then I got hired for second grade and the rest was history,” she said.

From her perspective it’s a good age to teach, she said.

“I truly love the seven (and) eight-year-olds,” she said. “I’ve just always related.”

She was student-teaching when Mt. St. Helens erupted and covered Moses Lake in a layer of ash, with the result that in-person classes were canceled for the rest of the year. Her career is ending after a worldwide pandemic closed schools to in-person learning for various lengths of time.

“So those are my bookends, COVID and Mt. St. Helens,” she said.

Both were memorable, but the pandemic was worse.

“It was because of the fear of the unknown. COVID - that was the most bizarre ending ever. Mt. St. Helens was weird but COVID was even weirder,” she said.

Children face more distractions than they did in 1980, which has presented a challenge, she said. She always found it a rewarding career nonetheless.

“I looked forward to it. Morning is my favorite time, when they’re ready to go and you get in a structure - it’s extremely rewarding,” she said. “I wouldn’t have done it for 43 years had I not loved it.”

With the end of school she’s going to travel a little, she said, and work the yard of her home near Moses Lake. Every year Peninsula second graders are invited out to the pumpkin patch to get their own pumpkin for Halloween. Dopps said that tradition will continue.

“I’ll volunteer. I’ll do some things that I don’t think I need to get paid for. There are so many places that need help,” she said.

Cheryl Schweizer may be reached at cschweizer@columbiabasinherald.com.