PIERPONT TOWNSHIP — Residents honored favorite teacher Janet Woodard, Friday night.
Dave Carr presented Woodard with the Lodge 284, Free and Accepted Masons’s Community Service Award, the 13th such honor the lodge has bestowed upon a citizen for his or her contributions to Pierpont.
“It is more important than ever to recognize the people of this community for making our community what it is,” Carr told the group before announcing the winner.
Woodard is wrapping up her 35th year of teaching first grade at Pierpont Elementary School. She has taught in the same room all 35 years. Carr estimated that in her career, Woodard has touched the lives
of at least 700 students.
“I think that is a beautiful way to serve the people of our community,” he said. Woodard is the daughter of Karl and Catherine Marcy of Pierpont. She attended Pierpont Elementary and graduated from Edgewood Senior High School in 1970. The first three years of her bachelor’s degree work were
at Kent State University-Ashtabula; she transferred to the main campus for her senior year.
Her student teaching was at Pierpont Elementary, and when the end of the school year came, she applied for a position there. Woodard says she still recalls Jim Hughes, the principal, offering her the job after the interview.
“I thought ‘I don’t know anything about what I’m doing, and you just put me in first grade?’” Woodard told the guests.
She said it had been a “week of surprises” for her. The school’s Parent Teacher Organization honored her during the Grandparents’ Day Breakfast.
Reflecting on her 35 years of teaching, long enough to now be teaching the second generation of students, Woodard said the years have gone by in “just a blink of the eye.”
