jo sullivan: experience, empathy help students decode words
She was an unsteady 8-year-old, still trying desperately to find her way. School so far had been a mighty struggle. While she was finally making progress academically, the young girl’s self-esteem was rock-bottom low, and life just didn’t seem to make much sense. How could it?
When she was two, her twin brother Joseph died, and, though his loss was difficult for her to comprehend, she would carry the emotional baggage for years.
At four, she began kindergarten. She was too young, too immature, too uncertain. Instinctively, she knew she was smart, but she just couldn’t keep up. As the other children reveled in the excitement of school, she found little pleasure in the day. As her friends learned to read, she lagged sadly behind.
Her promotion to first grade did nothing but fuel the flames of self-doubt. Repeating – encouraged by her mother – did little to help. Gamely but joylessly, she clambered on. Then, she walked into her third-grade classroom at Main Street Elementary in Harrisonburg, the dark clouds began to lift, and the cerulean sky appeared bright before her eyes. You see, that’s when she met Miss Howerton.
“She saved my life,” said Jo Sullivan, who will retire in June after 47 years in education, 36 of which she has spent at Collegiate. “She made me feel like I was worth something.”
All these years later, Jo has no recollection of her mentor’s first name. She does remember her as an attractive young woman with brown hair and a perpetual smile. She recalls her kind, gentle, soft-spoken, patient manner.
“She understood children,” Jo said. “She inspired me to become a teacher.”
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Jo’s career began after she graduated from University of Richmond with a degree in psychology and education. She taught one year each at Bridgewater Elementary and St. Michael’s, two in Chesterfield County, and then headed the Lower School at Gill School for seven years.
She arrived at Collegiate in 1969 and taught first grade until 1976 when she left to open a dress shop called Jodi’s in Sycamore Square. Two years later, Elizabeth Burke, the venerable Lower School head, approached her about returning to North Mooreland Road to replace a teacher who was retiring. Thankfully, Jo couldn’t refuse Miss Burke.
Initially, she taught a conventional first grade class, then the first-grade open classroom, and finally the “transitional first,” a group of 12 students who, for whatever reason, needed extra support. In 1987, she became the Lower School reading specialist. Though she’s worked with all elementary grades, her focus most recently has been on children in K-2 who meet regularly in groups of 4 to 7.
Thanks to a master’s degree in reading from UR and enough courses from UVA and VCU to make her an expert in learning disabilities, she has impeccable credentials. Thanks to her early experiences, she has a level of empathy that could never come from a textbook.
“I felt like such an underdog,” she said. “I never want a child to feel the way I was made to feel.”
Jo runs her young students through a range of activities that reinforce their regular classroom instruction. Always discreet and understated, she adroitly assesses their strengths and weaknesses, then focuses on such skills as phonemic awareness, spelling, handwriting, fluency, comprehension, syllable patterns, and decoding.
Many of her students know her story. She shares it to encourage them, to show them that they aren’t alone, to instill confidence, to give them hope. Her goal is to get them to a point where they no longer need her services.
“I see myself in the kids occasionally,” she said. “When they’re struggling, I’m struggling along with them because I know how I struggled.”
When she turns in her keys in June and heads across the river for the last time, Jo will slow down only slightly. She’ll continue to tutor, ministering quietly and caringly to the youngsters who need a helping hand as they unravel the mystery of reading. She just won’t pull car-pool duty, attend meetings, write reports, or make the early-morning commute from her home in Midlothian she shares with Bill, her husband of 53 years and where they raised their three daughters, Kim, Leslie, and Rebecca.
There are drawbacks, though. “I’ll really miss the people, the children,” she said as she reached for a tissue. “You go home tired, but you go home happy. I’ve loved every minute of the journey.”
