By Norma Dittman
Murray County News staff writer
At the end of this school year, Fulda Elementary School teacher, Lisa Peterson, will be retiring. She has been a teacher for 38 years with 37 of those years in the Fulda School District.
Mrs. Peterson taught during the 1980-1981 school year in Fulda. Due to budget cuts, she taught the following year at Hills-Beaver Creek. The next year, she returned to Fulda as a long-term sub for the fifth-grade class.
Then Mrs. Peterson was asked if she would be willing to work with Early Childhood Special Education. “I got my license in Early Childhood Special Education shortly after Alicia was born. I continued to work part-time in early childhood preschool and part-time Title One reading,” Mrs. Peterson stated. “Then in 1989, I went part-time in just the Early Childhood special needs preschool classroom so I could be at home more with my young children. This was a classroom for only special needs students. In the middle 90’s Alice Spartz and I combined our classrooms to make an inclusion classroom with team teaching and all students together. This was still a half-time job, but it was a truly great move. Alice is very wonderful to work with. I think we made a good team and worked well together to help all those kiddos that have gone through preschool. In the year 2000, I was approached by the then Murray County Central School principal, Sally Berg, to take over the 0-3 special needs program for both Fulda and MCC, which was in addition to my preschool classroom duties. And I have been doing that until now.”
Ironically, Mrs. Peterson said that when she first obtained her Elementary Education degree, she did not include the kindergarten endorsement. “I did my student teaching in third grade. I kept thinking that I would prefer to work with the upper elementary grades. But, you never know what the Good Lord has in store for you.”
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