As the 2024–2025 school year comes to an end, the schools say farewell to seven staff members, six of whom are retiring. Five of these are featured in this issue of the Press. Retiring from HES are special education teacher Marisa Khurana, grade 5 teacher Rob Cullinane, and grade 2 teacher Cindy Steeves. Bromfield will bid goodbye to counselor Christine Reale, math teacher Rick Tabor, and history teacher Kathleen Doherty.
Christine Reale reflects on her career with gratitude and pride in her students
Christine Reale has been a school counselor in Harvard for 24 years and has had the unique experience of serving at all levels—elementary, middle, and high school. “It has allowed me to experience so many amazing memories and long-standing relationships, to hone my skills and create new techniques that are developmentally appropriate, and enjoy a lot of laughter. Best of all, it has afforded me the honor to watch them grow from those small 3- and 4-year-olds into the young adults they have become as seniors,” she said in a recent conversation in her office.
Lying at her feet was Harley, her black Lab therapy dog, who was approved by the School Committee and has been working with her for the past seven years.
Reale spent 16 years at Hildreth Elementary School as a counselor for prekindergarten through grade 5. She said when she first started work there, she dealt with issues like kids feeling left out during recess on the playground. By the end of her time, the issues were more serious, with kids suffering from depression and anxiety. In recent years she has brought Harley over from the high school a few times to visit first-grade classes and help children with anxiety.
At HES, Reale began a peer leadership program for fifth-graders to give them more independence and responsibility. The peer leaders had various jobs around the school—reading morning announcements, acting as hall monitors, and helping younger students in different ways. Reale organized a number of schoolwide assemblies; she would write the script and arrange for speakers, and the peer leaders would act as hosts. The assemblies fostered a sense of community and belonging among students, faculty, and the greater community, Reale said.
A special assembly every year was for Veterans Day, during which local veterans were honored and students had an opportunity to interact with them. Reale also worked with Veterans Inc. and arranged for peer leaders to go to a shelter in Worcester to host a dinner and provide entertainment for veterans.
When a school counselor position opened up at Bromfield for grades 6 through 9, Reale took it. She was ready for a change and new challenges, and the teenage population was one she had worked with as a social worker at UMass Memorial Hospital’s 8 East mental health unit. After two years at middle school, she became the adjustment counselor at the high school, providing counseling services and skill building to help students manage obstacles and struggles.
Reale began working with the then school psychologist on a special program for high school students who were returning to school after an absence for physical, mental, or emotional reasons. She said the district had a long history of acknowledging the need for a program for such students but nothing had been done. Reale and the psychologist presented a draft for the Student Transitional Assistance and Academic Reengagement (STAAR) program to the superintendent and then to the School Committee. In January 2022, STAAR began.
Reale found a room for STAAR in the counseling department, and a grant from the Harvard Schools Trust gave her funds to purchase furniture for the room. It’s a safe place that provides academic and counseling support for young people struggling to return to the classroom, said Reale. The program allows for frequent communication and collaboration with parents, who, Reale said, have been supportive and open to suggestions. STAAR has offered some of the best relationships with parents and kids that she has had in her career, Reale said. “There’s an opportunity to know them at a deeper level.”
“The rewards of counseling are being able to see someone gain a sense of self-awareness and acceptance, as well as experience the growth and confidence that success and failures bring,” said Reale. “I have such a sense of pride and gratitude for my students when they graduate. It’s amazing to be able to share in their accomplishments and know they have such bright futures ahead of them.”
Reale has a business making all-natural, soft dog treats, which she sells at fairs and festivals in the area. Harley accompanies her and hangs out in a chef’s hat and coat. Reale and her husband have a home in South Carolina, and she said they will eventually move there full time from their home in Boylston.
Cindy Steeves, Hildreth Elementary School, ‘grateful for all the good’
Cindy Steeves is retiring after 15 years at Hildreth Elementary School, 10 of them teaching second grade. “I have mixed feelings,” Steeves said in a recent conversation. “I love what I do—this is where I belong, helping kids learn—but it’s time to go.” She wants to spend more time with her elderly parents and with her two daughters, who live in New York City.
Teaching has been a second career for Steeves, though she said she always had teaching in the back of her mind. Both her parents were teachers. In high school, she was inspired by her French teacher, and she went on to major in languages in college. After a career in business, she had a job teaching French and Spanish in several area elementary schools in a program called Global Child, which met after school. Some of the teachers she worked with at HES urged her to enter the teaching profession, and she realized that was always what she wanted to do. After two years spent earning a master’s in education, Steeves eased into full-time teaching, substituting in second grade at HES and then for five years teaching math to small groups for remedial help and enrichment.
Cindy Steeves. (Photos by Lisa Aciukewicz0)
One of her greatest pleasures with second-graders is watching them plan and perform their end-of-the-year poetry and music play. They discuss who will do what, practice, and then pull everything together. Steeves said, with her voice full of emotion, that watching them work on the play, she realizes what had been developing in them all year long—how talented they are—“young thespians”—and how each child has a special skill.
Steeves has seen the population change over the years, with more international families and children who need help learning English. “Teachers have more on their plate,” she said. The challenge is to keep every student engaged and meet their individual needs and to use best practices for all children. She puts up labels for everything in her classroom. This helps those learning English but also helps spelling and vocabulary for all students. She teaches her students songs in French and Spanish. A favorite for the kids to sing is a French song in which a mother owl shushes her babies, “coucou, coucou,” telling them to be quiet. “There should be more singing in the classroom,” declared Steeves.
Steeves talked about how, outside of school, kids are very scheduled, with all kinds of lessons. “I wish we could bring back free play,” she said. She tells her students stories of what she did as a child. She was outside all the time, playing with friends. They would make puppets with teeth, made out of willow branches, and write and produce plays for the neighborhood. Not only was it fun, but they were learning independence, collaboration, and problem solving. She said Maker Spaces, such as the one at HES, bring in creativity and are a way to fill the gap left by the loss of free play.
A goal for teachers, Steeves said, is balancing technology. “Kids have a craving for media gratification,” and she acknowledges how hard it is for parents to manage technology with their children.
It’s a challenging job, with teachers wearing many hats, said Steeves. She would encourage anyone going into education to get hands-on experience early on so they know what they’re getting into. There are different opportunities outside of classroom teaching, like administration and curriculum development.
Reflecting on her years of teaching, Steeves said, “I look at the glass as half full and think of all the joys. I’m grateful for all the good.”
Over a 32-year career at Bromfield, Kathleen Doherty filled many roles
After 37 years of teaching, 32 of them in the Social Studies Department at Bromfield, Kathleen Doherty said in a recent conversation, “I love my job and I’m happy to be retiring.” A sign it was time, she said, was when she realized that she had three freshmen whose fathers and uncles she had taught years ago.
After thoughtful consideration, Doherty said she doesn’t really know what she will miss most. “I guess I’ll find out; I might be surprised.” A couple of things she is sure of now, though—she’ll miss her wonderful colleagues and friends, she’ll miss the lip sync, but she will not miss all the correcting or having to adapt to using AI as a tool for learning.
A short-term plan is that she and her husband are traveling across the country in a pickup truck with a camper in the back, a small RV that fits in the bed of the truck and over the roof of the cab. For camping, its legs are lowered, and the truck is driven out from under it. They plan to see a little bit of everything—from Niagara Falls to Mount Rushmore to the Grand Canyon. They will visit lots of museums, both natural and historical, visit friends, and spend time with Doherty’s mother in California.
Kathleen Doherty.
After the trip, she will allow herself “a year of grace.” But, of course, not quite. About five years ago, she volunteered—nobody else came forward and she figured she was “better than nobody”—to do class notes for the alum magazine for her alma mater, Vassar, and she will continue to do that. She said the program she was in at Vassar was excellent; she took education classes and did practice teaching while also majoring in political science.
Doherty said Bromfield is “a great place to work, and people wear many hats.” It’s clear that over the years she herself has worn as many hats as a person possibly could. She started out as a special education teacher for grades 8 to 12. She has taught what was then called world geography (now global studies), U.S. history, psychology, and current events. “It was humbling to change content and also a nice change of pace,” she said. And she enjoyed seeing her freshmen again in her classroom as juniors. She was chair of the Social Studies Department for 10 years. For all of her 32 years, she was very active in the Harvard Educators Association, serving in various officer roles and on the contract negotiating team as a member and often in the role of chair. “It was important work,” she said.
Since 1996, she has run a schoolwide presidential mock election. She borrowed an old voting machine from the town, and after a while the town clerk said the town was done with it and the school could keep it. During the COVID-19 pandemic, there was online voting, and this year there was early voting. She has been involved with the League of Women Voters annual Civics Cup event since it started, helping write questions and serving as a judge.
For several years, she chaperoned the ninth-grade trip to Washington, D.C., and the Model UN’s trip to Boston. She was advisor to the Quiz Team, which twice made it to the WGBH High School Quiz Show. The Gay Straight Alliance (now the letters GAS stand for Gender and Sexuality Alliance) started in 1996, and the next year students asked Doherty to be their adviser, which she was until “passing the baton” in 2022. In connection with the alliance, she organized a photo exhibit for the school and the community called “All Kinds of Families.”
She put on a number of other exhibits for the school and the community and said she was always grateful for the tremendous support she received from the Harvard Schools Trust. For mental illness awareness, she had an exhibit called “Nothing to Hide.” For Women’s History Month, she invited a female firefighter who was a first responder on 9/11 to speak in her classes and to the community in the evening, and did an exhibit of the woman’s New York photographs, which she drove to the city to pick up.
Doherty said the good thing about cleaning out her classroom for a final time is that she has had a chance to sort through years of papers and letters to reflect on the many meaningful things she did with Bromfield students and for the Harvard community.
Rob Cullinane, aka Mr. C, leaves legacy of Nature’s Classroom
Rob Cullinane, known to the kids as Mr. C, is retiring from Hildreth Elementary School after 32 years of teaching, all but two of them in Harvard. “I’ve had a wonderful career and loved every second,” he said. “But I want to go out while I still love it and while I’m still able to enjoy other things.”
Cullinane credits his high school guidance counselor, Mrs. Curtin, for giving him good advice that helped prepare him for teaching. He planned to major in culinary arts and management in college, and Mrs. Curtin told him to have a minor in English so he would have something to fall back on. After college, when he left being a chef and doing catering, he had a leg up for his master’s in elementary education.
His year of teaching second grade in Arlington was in a school that had had no new hires in about 30 years; he and the other new teacher stuck together in what was definitely “old school,” literally and philosophically. His room was a former coal bin, with windows high up, and the teacher next door had been best friends with the teacher Cullinane replaced. He felt her resentment toward him was exacerbated by his having students work in groups instead of having their desks in straight rows, and instead of workbooks, he had them on the floor drawing whales. He would not have stayed on, and, as it happened, he and his partner moved to Harvard.
Rob Cullinane.
HES was a much better match for his philosophy and methods of teaching, he said. He taught second grade for three years, in a grade 2-3 combination for four years, and third grade for 12 years. He said he loved spending time with the younger kids, being delighted by their eagerness, unexpected questions and responses to things, and their adoration.
A big change came when the fifth-grade teacher who had been running Nature’s Classroom, a weeklong trip to an outdoor education facility, retired. The program was going away, and Cullinane couldn’t let that happen. So he moved to fifth grade to teach math, science, and social studies and be the Nature’s Classroom coordinator. He’s done that for 12 years and has enjoyed the thoughtful and candid conversations he is able to have with his students.
Reflective of Cullinane’s deep connection to his students is a poster that’s been in his classroom for 30 years. It’s a Winnie the Pooh quote that he read to the children at the beginning and end of each year: “If there is ever a time when we are not together, there is something you must always remember. You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think. But the most important thing is, even if we’re apart—I’ll always be with you.”
Perhaps more than anything else, Nature’s Classroom will be the legacy of Mr. C. The trip is an opportunity for teachers to see kids in a different way and for them to learn more about themselves. He feels today’s kids need to learn to cope and persevere, play creatively, and understand the importance of community. Nature’s Classroom is an opportunity for them to be on their own, to engage in team building, and to test their courage. He recalled, with emotion, one boy, years ago, who was so frightened and unhappy that his mother came to take him home. She had brought her older son, who had gone to Nature’s Classroom a few years earlier. He told his brother that he had also been scared but that during the week he had grown and learned. “At the end of the week you will be so proud of yourself,” he told him. His words were convincing.
Cullinane is looking forward to a year of traveling “like crazy.” He and his husband are going to London and Portugal this summer; Nova Scotia in September, when he would have been setting up his classroom; Japan in the fall; South America in March; and China in the spring. They have a condominium in Fort Lauderdale and plan to live there six months and a day—enough of the year to be considered residents. He has been trained as a volunteer in the NICU at a hospital there and is looking forward to holding newborns.
But they’ll be back in Harvard for part of the year and involved in the town. And Mr C told his current fifth-graders he’ll be at their high school graduation.
Rick Tabor sought to make math accessible to all
Rick Tabor has seen many graduations in his 25 years of teaching math at the Bromfield School. “Watching kids going off to the next level to pursue their dreams is so exciting,” he said in an interview. Tabor, who is retiring this year, is in some sense, moving on to the next level himself. Asked what he will miss most, he said simply, “Everybody. … There’s such a positive vibe here at Bromfield.”
Tabor thought about being a teacher for a long time, he said, before he took the step to do so. He worked in operations research at Natick Army Labs, used his math skills in actuarial work, and did some construction along the way before becoming a math teacher at age 35. He began by teaching seventh- and eighth-graders in Leominster and then moved on to high school math in Lunenburg before coming to Bromfield.
Asked about the changes he has seen in the math curriculum over the years, Tabor said the trend has been to push some material down into earlier grades. The goal now, he said, is to give students at least some exposure to calculus before they graduate from high school; that wasn’t always the case, he explained.
Rick Tabor.
But the biggest change has been the incorporation of technology. Tech is “a big part of the job now,” Tabor said. Students still use textbooks, but many of the books include references to online exercises or videos. The videos, he said, help students who process information better by hearing it spoken than by reading it on a page. “Khan Academy was a game changer,” he said, speaking of the nonprofit company that produces online educational tools and short video lessons.
Asked how he works with students who may find math difficult, Tabor said he uses a variety of approaches. One way is to find out what interests a student and then try to connect math to that topic. He also uses visual techniques and hands-on projects.
Tabor’s approach won praise from many students, Bromfield graduate Tiana Jiang recalled. Now a rising senior at M.I.T., Jiang wrote in an email, “[A]ll of my classmates raved about what a great teacher he was! They said he was encouraging and made them like math class even when they weren’t ‘math people.’”
One memorable Bromfield experience that Tabor mentioned was chaperoning the student service trips to New Orleans in 2019 and 2020. About 30 students went on each trip and helped to repair or maintain homes, some of which were still scarred by damage from Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
“When you are down there scraping paint off an old railing,” Tabor said, “people know you are volunteering. And they come up to you and say all sorts of nice things—‘God bless you’ and ‘Thank you.’” He said it was a moving experience for everyone.
Another student activity in which Tabor has been involved is the Bromfield Investment Club. For the past three years, he has been the club’s co-advisor with Andrew Wright. Students take part in a free game, HowTheMarketWorks, with an imaginary $100,000 they can use to buy and sell stocks, bonds, or mutual funds. They can then track their holdings weekly. Local people with experience in investment and finance have come as speakers for the club.
In retirement Tabor is looking forward to playing a lot of pickleball, saying he and his wife are both avid about the sport. And he also foresees miles of travel on his 2018 Indian motorcycle around the back roads of western Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and upstate New York.
