Paraprofessional Kitty Rieske’s eyes lit up, and a huge smile spread over her face as she listed things she planned to do in retirement.
“Reading, I will have time to read more books—many more books—which I am very excited about. Gardening, golf, travel, eating, cooking, cooking, eating.”
As a pre-retirement plan, Rieske has been working as a paraprofessional at the school for 11 years. She began working as an English teacher in Ohio and continued her teaching career in Reading, Lincoln, Newton and at an air force base in Massachusetts.
For 15 years, while her children were growing up, Rieske worked at her husband’s architectural firm. At the high school, she has been a one-on-one aide for a student with asperger’s syndrome and worked in the learning center.
She has been given the opportunity to teach without having to grade and go to meetings, she said.
According to Rieske, being an English teacher has always been her dream.
“I love English,” she said. “My dad always read to me. He loved classics. He would read Alice and Wonderland to me, and then he read Pinocchio, and then he read Wind in the Willows. I just got absorbed into that magical world. I love fantasy. I still read Harry Potter. I have the Game of Thrones sitting on my bedside table waiting for this summer.”
Rieske recalls her first day at BHS when she worked as an aide for a School Within a School senior with asperger’s.
“Mostly, my first day here was sitting on the church pew in SWS because the other teachers told me that they didn’t want me in their classroom,” she said.
But, according to Rieske, she was eventually able to work her way into the classroom and to educate teachers about how she could both help the student and the teacher working with him.
Rieske said she enjoyed BHS and believes it is a great school. Now, though, she is excited and ready to leave, comparing herself to a graduating senior.
“It’s like, ‘Really? I don’t have to get up at 5:30 in the morning? I can sleep in on a snowy day?’” Rieske said. “All winter long, I kept thinking, ‘Oh, next year, I will be able to sleep through this. I won’t have to fight the traffic on Route 9 to get to school.’”
