Teachers struggle with retiring during pandemic

ALLOUEZ, Wis. – Never in her more than 40 years of teaching has Kay Bessert, a longtime kindergarten teacher at Webster Elementary in Green Bay, Wisconsin, counted down the number of days to the end of the school year.

Bessert hates endings, she hates reading the last page of a good book, and most of all, she hates every spring when she has to say goodbye to her students, whom she carefully guided through their first year of school and, she hoped, “set the tone” for the 12 years of education ahead of them.

But in June, Bessert faced perhaps the most difficult farewell of all, as she retired from a 43-year career, including 24 years at the Green Bay School District in the midst of a global pandemic that shuttered schools across the state.

Instead of walking her children to the playground on that last day of school, tearfully saying goodbye and giving them one last hug as their teacher, Bessert found herself alone in the mostly empty school, cleaning out her classroom and decades of teaching materials while socially distanced from the fellow teachers and administrators she had worked alongside for decades.

“It’s just unreal. You don’t know how to really put it into words. I never thought I’d end my career this way – it’s sort of empty,” Bessert said. “I just want that final hug, that closure, the goodbye, even though I usually don’t like it.

“The whole emptiness right now is so hard,” Bessert added as she started to tear up.

“When I close my door the last time, it’s not just the end of the school year, it’s the end of the career.”

Bessert is among the many other educators – teachers, administrators and other school staff – who find themselves retiring after the most abnormal academic year in memory.

After the state Department of Health Services required all K-12 public and private schools to close in March, school leaders and teachers were forced to quickly pivot, ready or not, to long-term distance learning.

Retiring teachers from around the state told USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin that it was difficult not getting those last few months to bask in their last days as an educator.

They wanted to appreciate the children, as well as the teachers and school staff they worked with for decades, before they walked out of their classrooms for the final time.

“In my wildest dreams, I would’ve never guessed that this is the way my 30-plus-year career in education is coming to an end, that’s for sure,” said Jean Born, outgoing superintendent of Sheboygan Falls School District.

Leaving without the joys of the job

To Born, it feels as if her career is ending without her favorite part of the job: The people.

Since schools shuttered, Born has worked at home and at school. But it’s nothing like the school she has grown accustomed to. These days, she socially distances herself from others by mostly staying inside her office. The high school, attached to the district office, is quiet.

“It’s really unusual. It was kind of like summer time, when you don’t hear kids in the hallway, all the noises and the bells,” Born said. She had been superintendent for nine years after 16 years as the district’s director of curriculum and instruction and jobs as a middle school English language arts teacher and reading specialist.

Born has been able to communicate with her staff through phone and video calls. On a weekly basis, she meets with her principals and pops into other staff meetings to check in. But it’s not the same.

“By nature, I’m very much a people person – that’s kind of what teaching is all about. I’m very much the person who wants to have that conversation, get that hug and that’s certainly not going to happen anymore,” Born said. “So this is really difficult for me, ending these 30 years in Sheboygan Falls without being able to see the people that I’ve worked with for many years and have grown to be very good friends with, both professionally and personally.”

For Cam Markwardt, a fifth-grade teacher at McKinley Elementary School in Appleton, the best part of her job has always been standing in front of the classroom and her students showing they understand the material and are excited about learning.

Not getting to do that one last time after 25 years at the Appleton Area School District was difficult to say the least, she said.

Although Markwardt has kept in contact with her fifth-graders through weekly small group Google Hangouts, where she reviews material they had worked on in the classroom – and she also holds a weekly nonacademic meeting for the whole class to play games and socialize – nothing compares to that feeling.