Clarice Thomas was talking about her 25-year teaching career with Buckeye Local when her cell phone rang and Thomas asked to be excused. She had been waiting for the call for decades; it was about her Medicare benefits.

Thomas is one of three veteran teachers wrapping up careers at Kingsville Elementary on Monday. Also retiring are Gail Burlingham and Cheryl Kimmel; the three ladies have 99 years of combined teaching experience between them.

Kimmel leads the trio with 39 years, all at Kingsville.

The Conneaut native graduated from St. John High School in 1967 and the University of Dayton in 1971. She spent her first 20 years teaching third grade, then moved to first and is ending her career in second.

“I just thoroughly enjoy (the elementary grades),” she says. “(The students) are cute, funny, have a great sense of humor at that age.”

Gail Burlingham started working at Kingsville in 1965, as a junior-high physical education teacher. Burlingham says her career path was set in while in junior high.

“I had a gym teacher I really liked so I decided to be a gym teacher, although I had no athletic skills,” Burlingham says.

She was just 21 years old when she started teaching, and had a rocky start to her career, suffering through two reduction-in-force actions. The seminal event was heeding the advice from a school nurse.

“She said to me, ‘Gail, do you really think you’ll want to be in gym when you are my age?’ You need to go back and get the classroom certificate.’” Burlingham recalls. “It was a good move.”

Burlingham, who received her undergraduate degree from Florida State, received classroom certification from Edinboro and went on to get a master’s from Youngstown State.

She started her elementary-classroom career in Pierpont, and while she recalls it as a “good place to start,” her heart has always been in Kingsville.

“I loved Kingsville School, so we moved into Kingsville so our boys could go to school here,” she says.

She’s been a teacher at Kingsville since the early 1990s and ends her career in the fourth grade.

Clarice Thomas is a Niagara Falls native who has 25 years in the Ohio teachers retirement system. She also taught in New York and Kentucky; her husband got a job with Union Carbide, which brought them to Ashtabula County.

Thomas took a 14-year hiatus from full-time teaching to raise their three daughters. All three women say having children of their own helped them be better teachers.

“You have to be consistent. Basically, I think you have to do the same things (with students) that you do with your own kids,” says Thomas, who did substitute teaching until her youngest went into third grade. “If you can’t back up what you say, don’t say it. Be prepared, and be consistent. And carry a big stick.”

As a substitute, Thomas’ big stick was her point system. Students started each day with 10 points, and they  need to have at least six left by noon in order to go outside.

“They made each other behave,” Thomas says.

She spent her first full-time year at Buckeye teaching kindergarten at Pierpont, then came to Kingsville to teach fourth grade in 1992. She wraps up her career in the fifth grade.

All three women have seen classroom instruction tools change dramatically, from blackboards to computers, and now, interactive white boards. They’ve also seen the level of expectation rise for both teachers and students, even as parents have been less involved in their children’s education.

“The kids are expected to know a lot more now in the second grade than when I first started,” Kimmel says.

The women say they have donated their teaching supplies to other staff and plan to make a clean break with the profession. But, Kimmel, who after decades of teaching always got nervous on the first day, predicts it won’t be until school resumes before they realize how life-altering retirement is.

“When the kids go back to school, that’s when it is really going to hit me that I’m done,” Kimmel says. “I don’t feel like I’ve been doing this for 39 years, but when you stop and look back at it, it’s like, ‘Oh my gosh!’”

While they’ve all anticipated this time in their lives, none of them has definite plans except to spend more time with the grandchildren.

“I’m getting a grandson for a week, and then I’ll probably go into shock after a week with him,” Thomas says.