Helen Rogers

July 21, 1928 - December 23, 2019

Helen Rogers, age 91, passed away peacefully December 23, 2019 in Mill Valley, California. She was born in Indianapolis, Indiana on July 21, 1928.

Helen shared her zest for life with everyone she met. Her three great passions were helping others, the mathematics of geometry, and exploring and protecting the great outdoors. Helen experimented with a variety of interests, working for a jeweler in Indianapolis, summering as a junior park ranger, accounting, and antiques retail in San Francisco’s Jackson Square, before she finally settled on her long-term career - a high school math teacher.

Helen was a magnificent teacher, beginning first at The Branson School in Ross, California, and then spending 25 years at San Francisco University High School. Helen loved engaging with growing minds grappling with mathematical challenges and felt at home being encouraging and enthusiastic and determined by turns. Among her many teaching talents, one that Helen thoroughly enjoyed (and that extended beyond math into art) was her uncanny ability to draw a perfect circle on a blackboard; a useful talent for a geometry teacher. Her students more than remembered her, as many of them kept in touch with her long after graduation, including in recent years.

After 38 years of teaching, Helen did not slow. She launched headlong into volunteering at The GATE Academy in San Rafael, helping high ability middle schoolers with a talent for high school math. And then she found her perfect niche with Next Generation Scholars, an organization in San Rafael whose mission is to assist dedicated underserved high school students forge their way into college. In 2015, Helen was recognized as the Marin County “Volunteer of the Year” for her work at Next Generation Scholars.

Throughout life, Helen’s love of the outdoors shone through. This love may have first blossomed when she and her brother Bill hitchhiked from Indianapolis to Glacier National Park in the summer of 1948. Teaching permitted Helen to spend many summers hiking the mountains of California or on hiking ventures around the globe. She made good use of this interest and energy after her retirement, working to inventory Mill Valley’s neglected pedestrian trail system, hiking up and down hills finding overgrown steps, fence encroachments, lost marker poles, and the like. She reviewed decades of Mill Valley council records and resolutions relating to the paths beginning with 1900, deciphering spidery handwriting from leather bound minute books. Helen was an ardent spokeswoman for the paths and spent hundreds of hours protecting this very special Mill Valley community asset.

Helen is survived by her brother Bill Rogers and her four nieces and nephews; Alexandra Longsworth, Lesley Rogers, Mark Lester, and Peter Lester.

Please join us in celebrating her life on Saturday, January 25, 2020, from 2 P.M. — 4 P.M. at the Mill Valley Community Center, 180 Camino Alto, Mill Valley, California.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made to Next Generation Scholars www.nextgenerationscholars.org.