Su White ’82 was contemplating retirement from teaching when the pandemic came and launched her into activism on behalf of families and early childhood professionals.

In October 2023, White shared her story as part of the “Purpose and Place: Voices of Middlebury” event during the campus launch of For Every Future: The Campaign for Middlebury.

Watch White’s talk above or read the transcript below.

Transcript

I’m an early educator, a preschool teacher, and when my Middlebury teacher ed professor placed me in a classroom for my student teaching, I loved it. And I never left. 

I am still at the Quarry Hill School in Middlebury, and I used my voice a little bit too much today on the playground. So forgive me for that.

I love three-, four-, and five-year-olds. They are so authentic and their authenticity really supports me bringing my best self to work every day.

I love stories. I love singing. I love sharing.

And what has happened for me over the years of working at Quarry Hill are beautiful relationships. I think of them like a beautiful necklace full of gorgeous beads, pearls. 

A pearl: a little guy—you know, not every three-year-old can keep a beat—but this guy, every time music came on, head bopping, way into it.

And I had a boyfriend who played in a band. So I had this brilliant idea, let’s bring the boyfriend in and they can play together.

And so that’s what happened. They struck it up and this little guy: over the moon, foot tapping, air guitar, it was a total win.

And you know, I still get hugs from that guy at the grocery store, but where I really love to see him the most is on the Jumbotron because he’s a really famous musician these days. Amazing. Pearl.

Another one: little girl, not an easy life at home. It was hard. And part of our relationship was hugs every day. It was something that we shared and it brought us both a really beautiful thing.

And we kept up our relationship over the years. Her life, it actually got to be a pretty darn good life. And when she was chosen to attend the Governor’s Institute as a senior in high school, she invited me to accompany her as her educator from her school career. A pearl.

Amazing. So here I am with this incredible string of pearls and I started to wonder, what might it be like if I didn’t do this anymore?

You know, what would it be like if I retired?

Hard to imagine. But I had all this memory and like all of us, COVID happened, and retirement wasn’t an option.

I couldn’t even think about retirement because my day had been reduced to a 15-minute Zoom circle with preschoolers, 15 of them, little boxes.

And there they are, you know, every group has one.

There’s Sally, wiggling away because that’s what she does. And I couldn’t say, Sally, come sit in my lap. You can help me turn the pages. Worked like a charm in person. But all I could do was watch her mother struggling, trying to keep her still.

And Howard. Every group’s got a talker too, right?

So Howard chatting away—his mother off to her own Zoom that she needed to get to—talking away about his dog that he had, you know, big nostril up in the camera. So excited about this. And she had completely forgotten to mute him—a disaster.

So this was my life. I was not fulfilling my promise to the kids I love so much, to the families that I had promised an amazing preschool experience.

It was devastating for all of us.

And I took my helplessness into other Zoom spaces, Montpelier, state capital, the governor, and our state legislators.

They wanted to hear what we needed to get started again, because childcare, as we all found out, was pretty darn important.

Those Zoom rooms took me down to Washington with Bernie [Sanders] and Peter Welch and the Vermont legislative team there.

And childcare was national news as well.

And what happened was we got what we needed, we got resources and we got some protocol.

And what most amazingly of all was we got attention and we got the green light. Back to planning, back to Zooming. We’re gonna organize and have an amazing outdoor preschool in Vermont.

What was it gonna look like in December?

So my Zoom planning was now no longer just Addison County or Vermont or even the U.S. It was national. I mean it was international.

And the early educators in Australia and in New Zealand were deep in winter while we were planning what it was gonna look like when we go back.

So I learned from my colleagues over there how we could safely introduce fire into our preschool setting. Yeah. Ever done a fire with three-, four-, and five-year-olds?

Well, we did it. We do what preschool teachers do. We pretaught. We scaffolded. In September, we drew fire, we pretended fire. In October, we gathered kindling and we crumpled paper.

And in November when it got cold, we got out the matches and we lit a fire.

And those kids owned that fire. And there they were, safely tucked behind that red line that they knew was the safe place. And those cocoa mustaches above the big, huge smiles, we had done it. I locked eyes with my colleagues across the flames and we knew collectively we had done it.

We had all we needed. These kids were thriving.

We had all we needed. We had all we needed for the first time ever.

We had all we needed. We had resources, and we had a collective of not only early educators, but lawmakers and community members and that attention that I was talking about.

So it dawned on me that this wasn’t about COVID anymore.

This was about possibility. Possibility of leveraging what we now had into a new frontier for early childhood education.

A place where kids had what they needed, families weren’t struggling to pay for childcare, and where professionals were well compensated and well prepared.

Vermont has led the way. In April of 2023, there I was, Statehouse behind me, microphone in front of me, and the collective, the early educators, the lawmakers, and the community members.

And I had the opportunity to share with them the vision of Act 76, which is a bill that outlines universal childcare in perpetuity, well funded, that does all those things: quality care, affordable care, and well-compensated, professional workforce.

The lawmakers, they went back into the Statehouse and they passed the bill.

First in the nation. Vermont is leading the way. It’s historic and we are on the ground doing it.

Retirement? I got too much work to do. I’m supporting rolling out this bill, and I’m not gonna stop until I know that every child and every family and every early childhood professional has what they need to thrive.

Thank you.