HARLINGEN — She’s retiring and can’t wait to return to work.
Laura Perrill retired Friday from 36 years of teaching at Austin Elementary, but she’s looking forward to getting her name on the list of substitute teachers.
“Oh, I love the kids,” said Perrill, who taught pre-kinder and kindergarten students at Austin – and a little at Bonham.
“I love working with the kids and the parents and the staff,” said Perrill, 59. “They are wonderful. They are my second family.”
Perrill, the married mother of one daughter, recalled being somewhat thrown into her teaching position in December 1985. She’d just completed her student teaching at Austin when the kindergarten teacher there left to become a counselor.
“I was really worried because I hadn’t gotten my diploma yet,” she said. “We hadn’t gone through the graduation so I got an emergency certificate to get started. So I started teaching before I received my diploma.”
A lot has happened since 1985, said Perrill, who describes herself as a kinder, bilingual, digital teacher.
“When I started, everything was one with books,” she said. “Then we came into the digital era and we started using the computers. I went from a floppy disk to a pin drive and where I am today using an Apple Mac computer with Apple TV and doing Zoom. So I’ve seen a lot of changes.”
The needs fostered by the pandemic have offered significant challenges. She and her colleagues have had to substantially alter their teaching strategies to include safety precautions. And they’re having to employ those approaches both remotely and face to face.
“All summer we were going through a lot of training and so we didn’t have much of a vacation as teachers,” she said. “We had to train the parents also on how things were going to get done. So besides learning myself with the new program I had to help the parents out.”
And of course she was willing to do that.
“I give the parents my phone number,” she said. “When there’s a problem, they can reach me. I treat the parents just like my family, like my students here ad the staff. I’ve always been about helping others any way I can.”
She looks forward to helping the new kindergarten teacher any way she can.
