Teacher’s emotional last day

By Emily Richmond (contact)

Friday, June 9, 2006 | 7:42 a.m.

For math teacher Meredith Peters, the tears started Thursday long before the last bell rang for her last class on her last day at Jim Bridger Middle School in North Las Vegas.

"I had to tell the kids, 'Don't say anything, because I'll lose it,' " said Peters, who's wrapping up a 36-year teaching career - all at Bridger.

"I was 21 when I started here in this neighborhood. I basically grew up here. Why would I want to leave it?"

The school community hasn't wanted her to leave, either.

"She could have moved on anywhere in the last 30 years, but she chose to stay," North Las Vegas Councilwoman Shari Buck, a former student, said. "That's service, that's sacrifice and that shows how much she cared about helping kids and changing their lives."

Since her first day on the job in 1970, Peters has seen the educational trends, techniques and regimented demands come full circle.

"When I first became a teacher it was called 'Schools Without Failure,' " she recalls. "Now it's 'No Child Left Behind.' The silliest thing I ever heard was 'new math,' when they told us students didn't need to memorize their multiplication tables. I went over the deep end over that."

But Peters said there have been some healthy changes, including a push to make math more interactive and divide larger classes into teams for problem-solving exercises.

While it may not equate to some, Karissa Armstrong, who finished seventh grade at Bridger on Thursday, said math class was fun.

"You know how some kids hate math and don't want to do it because it's hard?" Armstrong said. "Every time you're in here Ms. Peters makes you laugh."

Buck remembers Peters as one of her earliest role models.

"It was the first time I realized you could be a single woman and be hugely successful - up to then my math teachers had all been men," Buck said Thursday of her time in Peters' classroom in the early 1970s. "But Miss Peters was brilliant and she was funny."

The neighborhood surrounding Bridger has shifted over the past two decades from upper middle class to solidly blue collar, with a student population that is 70 percent Hispanic and more than 40 percent with limited proficiency in English.

Peters, though, has been a constant.

"Inside, she's still young - she can relate to the students and understand them," said Svetlana Guillory, an English language learning specialist who has worked with Peters for the last nine years. "After a lot of years you can get negative and sarcastic. But she's still an optimist."

A decade ago she started giving out her home phone number to students - something unheard of among teachers. For Peters it was no problem - her phone has rung regularly most evenings.

"Sometimes they just want to say hi, sometimes it's, 'How do I do question No. 7?' " Peters said.

"In all these years I've never had one inappropriate phone call - not one. I think that says a lot about these kids."