Award-winning teacher steps away from profession due to pandemic
Picacho Middle School teacher Kellie Dinsmore is pictured at Picacho Middle School in Las Cruces on Saturday, July 18, 2020. [Nathan Fish / Las Cruces Sun-News]
LAS CRUCES – At the June 25 meeting of the Las Cruces Public Schools Board of Education meeting, Kellie Dinsmore was recognized with the New Mexico School Board Association’s Excellence in Student Achievement Award. She had been nominated for the award by Board Secretary Ray Jaramillo.
“When Kellie Dinsmore was 4 years old, she befriended a little girl of similar age who had a severe developmental disability,” Jaramillo’s nominating letter read. “Their differences didn’t push them apart. Their differences brought them together. And so, on the eve of turning 5, Kellie invited the little girl to her birthday party.”
Upon receiving the invitation, Kellie’s friend’s mother cried — because her daughter had never before been invited to a birthday party.
“Kellie was 4 when she realized a truth that should be universal, but isn’t — the world is big enough for everyone,” the letter read.
When Kellie got to college, she majored in education and specialized in special-needs children. She just completed her 27th year as a low-incidence special education teacher with Las Cruces Public Schools.
Around the same time, because of the novel coronavirus, she informed the district of her plans to retire — for now.
Kellie Dinsmore [Nathan Fish / Las Cruces Sun-News]
“I feel like I should tell you that I’ve retired — and I haven’t really told a lot of people, because I had planned on going back when all of this settles in, and I can do some double-dipping,” Dinsmore told me on Friday. “I really am enjoying what I was doing, but I was not ready to go back.”
Dinsmore said she watched the July 14 board meeting — at which LCPS Superintendent Karen Trujillo decided the district would start school with online-only instruction — and was “so happy” that the district would not resume in-person instruction, even on a hybrid model.
For Dinsmore, it was not an easy decision.
“I was really intending on coming back next year; if they were going to go (online), I was going to come back,” she said. “I had a lot of support from my colleagues, because I’m not very computer-savvy — I’m really not. If there are going to be computer problems, it’s going to happen to me. Everyone was trying to help. But when they said we were going back in-person, I said, ‘I can’t do that.’ I can’t feed kids from six feet away.”
For the past 27 years, Dinsmore has been a special education teacher, working with some of the district’s most medically fragile students.
“They gave us a week — which they extended — to give a medical reason if we couldn’t return to the classroom and wanted to teach virtually,” she said. “So I went to my doctor. Some of my students are in diapers, and I was concerned about COVID being present in fecal matter. My doctor said my mask would not protect me from that.”
Fortunately — and unlike so many of her colleagues — Dinsmore was eligible to retire.
“There were just a whole bunch of things that led me to the decision to retire,” she said. “My (teaching) license doesn’t expire until 2023, so I’ll be able to go back in a year and draw my retirement and my salary. And I can retire with 30 years in 2023.”
In the meantime, she’s got plenty to keep her busy.
“I serve on two boards of directors, and we’re also going to be homeschooling my granddaughter, who’s 13,” Dinsmore said.
Kellie Dinsmore [Nathan Fish / Las Cruces Sun-News]
Dinsmore spent most of her career at Mesilla Elementary, where she taught for 25 years. Then, as her program evolved, she ran out of medically fragile special ed students at Mesilla — and the district transferred her to Picacho Middle School, where she worked in a similar role.
“I will always cherish my time at Mesilla Elementary, but middle school was just a whole different ballgame,” she said. “I was so fortunate to work with the wonderful principals and administration; we just had a great time. At Picacho, there were two other programs like mine. In elementary, I had always been in my own little ‘boat.’ But, having two other programs similar to mine, we had a lot of cooperation and got to take the kids on lots of field trips. It was so much fun.”
In addition to Dinsmore’s classroom, another Picacho teacher primarily taught autistic students. Another was a low-incidence classroom. Together, a camaraderie developed, and they formed a sort of team-teaching environment.
Kellie Dinsmore [Nathan Fish / Las Cruces Sun-News]
In January or February, Dinsmore began hearing about the novel coronavirus. Having a brother who was in a high-risk group, she was immediately concerned. But, at that time, it was difficult to foresee how it would upend her school year.
“It’s just so frightening,” Dinsmore said. “There’s so much that’s unknown, and it’s so contagious. I’ve been scared of it since I heard about it. I’ve talked to different people — including one of my colleagues — who feel like they’ve had it. Working around the kids I work with, I feel like I’ve developed a pretty strong immune system. But hearing my brother talk about it, and his concerns, I’ve been very cautious since day one.”
She started thinking about her students, who have a habit of putting things in their mouths.
“I have to always be aware of the cleanliness of their hands,” she said.
The reality of the situation began to set in days before school buildings were closed — when the Bataan Memorial Death March was canceled.
“One of my colleagues, Morgan Harding, was planning on participating in the death march," she said. “And she was so disappointed when it was canceled. But we all got the heebie-jeebies when we realized it was here. Then, I started having kids not show up. I only had two kids show up on that last Friday.”
When school buildings were closed, Dinsmore said, teachers just packed up and left.
“Over the course of the next couple months, we got permission to go back and collect our belongings and take all of our stuff home,” she said. “Our principal was very careful about making sure that there were only so many people (in the building at once). At that point, it had been a good month since that day in March, when we left.”
Given what she’d learned about the virus, and its ability to survive on surfaces, she felt confident that it was safe to return to her classroom.
“One of my colleagues was really stoic — and then she just kind of lost it,” Dinsmore said, fighting through emotion. “And we were like, ‘We’re gonna help you.’ So we socially distanced, but we packed her classroom, too. It was pretty intense.”
Establishing routines
For Dinsmore’s students, it was important to work with students and families to establish new routines they could get used to.
“I built a Google Classroom,” she said. “And, just like all three of us were doing stuff together at school, we tried to do something similar to that. But we were having computer and technology issues. And our kids are very different; even though they’re all low-incidence, they’re categorized in the classrooms very differently.”
“I tried to do videos, and looked through my materials and made material boxes for my kids and their families to come and pick up — things that the kids were familiar with,” Dinsmore explained. “And they loved it. One mom told me her daughter just got down on her knees and started taking out the little toys that she used to play with at school. And she was one that I was really worried about connecting with online. But, nope! She would just walk up to that camera, and she’d look at me and I’d look at her — and we did make a connection.”
When the pandemic set in, Dinsmore had six students — down from eight earlier in the school year.
“It didn’t work for everybody,” she explained. “But we were responsible for calling our kids and making regular contact with them. We did technology assessments, to see who has a computer and who doesn’t. We reported that back to the school so that they got the computers they needed at home. I made contact with my families once a week; we did a weekly Zoom meeting.”
Kellie Dinsmore [Nathan Fish / Las Cruces Sun-News]
Dinsmore said she can’t speak for all low-incidence or special ed students, because she thinks some would be just fine.
“But I was only going to have one of my students coming back,” she said. “And he’s such a sweet little guy. But that’s one of the things that we’ve been talking to parents about. The students have been at home, dealing with this in their own way — and maybe they are prepared. But a lot of parents have tried with the masks, and they’ve tried with the gloves, and the kids are just not going to have it. Those are the ones that are going to keep them home.”
“STAR is a really wonderful program, designed for children with autism, but it also works really well with a lot of kids who are in a low-incidence setting,” she explained. “As soon as COVID hit, they started working on their online program. What they were going to do is work with the kids face-to-face on the computer for an hour every day. And you work on establishing a routine. You do the calendar, the weather, tell me what you had for breakfast — and the kids would be divided into sections (depending on how much support they need).”
For Dinsmore’s students, she’d work with families to find a location in the home— a table or chair — for students to meet each day.
“We would provide, maybe on a weekly basis, different materials that we want them to work with,” she said. “In that hour, after you do that (initial) routine, you would establish a routine that addresses the needs of the individual child. Some parents may be having trouble with brushing teeth or feeding. So, we’re going to feed ourselves; I’m going to be feeding myself, and the parent or caretaker would be helping the kid feed themselves. Then we’d go into a math lesson, a language arts lesson, and then we would have our goodbye. You break up that hour into daily instruction time.”
Of course, this requires someone to be home with the child to facilitate the in-person learning.
What began as a hodgepodge of technological platforms has now become more uniform. Now, the district has narrowed it down to just one platform — Canvas.
“I think the district has really stepped up to provide the professional development to make this work,” Dinsmore said. “People like Wendi Miller-Tomlinson have just stepped up and have done amazing things. And (Superintendent) Karen Trujillo has been all about the health and safety of our students and staff. She listened to everyone — the community, the parents, the teachers and staff — before making a decision.”
Dinsmore said that every teacher she called after the July 14 board meeting — where it was decided the district would begin with online instruction — “just cried.”
“I heard someone say, ‘We need to get back to work, and we need our babysitters,’” she said, about the decision to return to in-person instruction. “We’re not babysitters, and I don’t appreciate when people think of us that way. We work hard with these kids, and we teach them.”
“I really miss everyone at Picacho — my colleagues, Morgan Harding and Ruby Vigil.”
When the virus is under control, she hopes to return to the classroom for a few years.
“I want to go back, because we were having so much fun,” she said.
The families of her students, however, are not comfortable with their kids returning to the classroom — and neither is she.
“They know the level of support their kids need,” she said. “And you just cannot do that from six feet away. I just didn’t know how I could do it safely — without getting my family sick, or maybe getting their family sick. And that would be terrible.”
Dinsmore said she knows the decision is even more difficult for single-parent families, in which the parent has to go to work.
“It’s really going to be a family-by-family decision,” she said. “And it hasn’t been easy for a lot of these families.”
She feels like the public conversation around teachers has shifted, she said.
“In the beginning, it was like, ‘Our teachers are our heroes,’ until summer was over,” Dinsmore noted. “Now it’s like, ‘Oh, you’re all just a bunch of namby-pambies because you don’t want to go back.’”
When asked about her own health, Dinsmore said she recently got tested for COVID-19 antibodies, and the results came back negative.
“But I’ve been very lucky to have been very healthy. I’ve also limited my time outside, like everybody, and taken the necessary precautions.”
Damien Willis is a reporter and columnist for the Las Cruces Sun-News. His biweekly column focuses on the impact of the COVID-19 crisis in Las Cruces and around the region. Have a story to share? Contact him at dwillis@lcsun-news.com or @DamienWillis on Twitter.
This story originally appeared in the Las Cruces Sun-News on July 20, 2020.
