First class teacher Homegrown and UMaine educated, Kelly O’Mara brings vision and vitality to her 10 youthful charges

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WYTOPITLOCK – All 10 pupils at Wytopitlock Elementary School were hard at work last Friday morning, including Harvey the reading dog.

Lying in a corner of the classroom, his head between his paws, the friendly golden retriever was being read a book about animals by Sierra Waite.

“Harvey, look!” the 10-year-old said, pointing to the illustrations.

The dog is brought to school each day by Kelly O’Mara, the school’s only teacher, who constantly is on the lookout for ways to keep her pupils – five sets of siblings in kindergarten through grade five – excited about learning.

“It takes a lot of energy and creativity,” O’Mara, a 2006 graduate of the University of Maine, said.

When she was offered the job last summer, she didn’t hesitate.

“I can’t imagine walking away from the experience and not being a better teacher,” said O’Mara, 22, who is enjoying the challenge of meeting a variety of academic needs and abilities.

“It’s exciting, it’s fun, and it’s something different every day,” she said.

In her class, O’Mara has one kindergartner, four first-graders, one second-grader, two third-graders, one fourth-grader and one fifth-grader.

The children stay together for science and social studies, but for reading, writing and math instruction, O’Mara separates them into kindergarten through grade one and grade two through grade five. She takes one group, and education technician Cathy Kecki, also new to the school, takes the other.

“It’s divide and conquer,” O’Mara said.

Three weeks into the academic year, the class has settled into a routine that includes reading to Harvey.

“This way the kids get experience reading aloud, hearing their own voice and working through words without feeling like they’re being judged,” O’Mara said.

“Harvey won’t say anything,” she added with a grin.

Also new this year is a school “reward store” with items such as pens, notebooks and Silly Putty that pupils can redeem with “tokens” they have received for good behavior. If they misbehave, a token could be taken away.

The idea is to use positive reinforcement instead of punishment, O’Mara said.

“I never liked the idea of taking away recess,” she said. “It’s very important so children can get rid of their energy.”

She incorporates music into the classroom as much as possible. The pupils do “rap” as part of their math lesson and sing about caterpillars in science class. “Music and rhyming lets kids remember things a lot easier,” she said.

A number of field trips have been planned this year, including visits to the Francis Malcolm Science Center in Easton and the District Court in Houlton, where O’Mara’s father, Bernard O’Mara, presides as judge.

One recent day found Kecki teaching math to the first-graders in one room while O’Mara did the same thing with the third-graders in another.

Wearing earphones, kindergartner Laci Gilman was listening to a tape while Bethann Lee read aloud to a puppet and Sierra entertained Harvey.

Earlier, O’Mara had worked with the older pupils on articles they’re writing for the school newspaper, while Kecki helped the younger ones with their spelling.

Soon, the entire school would congregate for lunch in the cafeteria, with the staff sitting together at one table.

“It’s the one time we can talk to each other,” O’Mara said.

Built in 1968, the school is housed in a green wooden structure located in an open area in the town of Wytopitlock, part of Reed Plantation, population 433.

The school, which shares space with the town office, consists of three large classrooms and a smaller room used for special education, as well as a library, cafeteria, kitchen and main office.

For a short time last year, the school included five pupils in grades six through eight. But when their teacher went on maternity leave, the school board decided that the older ones would benefit by attending Mt. Jefferson Junior High School in Lee, where they could be with more pupils their own age.

With her youth and vitality, O’Mara has “brought a lot of new ideas and new thoughts” to the elementary school, Superintendent Fred Woodman said during a visit last Friday.

“We had a responsibility to get a top-notch teacher and we did,” he said.

The new teacher is just what the community needed, agreed school board member Kathryn Richardson.

“We were looking for somebody with some get-up-and-go,” she said during a phone interview.

More than 15 people applied for the job, according to Richardson. “We only interviewed the first six because by then we had made up our minds,” she said.

Meanwhile, O’Mara, who grew up in Easton, said that last summer, after earning her degree in elementary education, she sent out 33 applications to schools in Maine and received responses from only a handful. Her classmates had similar experiences.

There may be a shortage of teachers in math, science, special education and foreign languages, but it’s “really hard” to find a job as an elementary school teacher, she said.

The job held a special appeal for O’Mara. “It caught my imagination,” she said. “I got excited about it. It’s so unique – an opportunity that people don’t get anymore,” she said, noting the virtual disappearance of the old one-room schoolhouse.

In fact, Wytopitlock Elementary is one of five one-teacher schools in Maine and the only one not on an island.

There are 376 one-teacher schools nationwide, according to the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics. Ninety years ago, there were more than 200,000 such schools that educated more than half the nation’s youths, said a 2003 Education Week article.

Gathering around O’Mara as she read to them last Friday, the Wytopitlock pupils said they liked their new teacher. She’s “funny,” “nice” and “exciting,” they agreed.

“She reads a lot of stories,” James Schurmann, 8, who’s in the third grade, said.

“She lets us draw,” fourth-grader Michelle Moulton, 10, said.

During the past three weeks, O’Mara said she has come to realize the educational benefits of a multi-age classroom. Learning is reinforced in older children as they teach the younger ones, she said.

Each day she also comes away having learned something new.

“Someone asked me how I was going to do this,” she recalled. “I said, ‘Ask me in June!'”