Southdown's Toni Young Says Goodbye
Toni Young is retiring but the full impact of life outside of a classroom hasn't completely sunk in for the veteran Southdown Primary School math teacher.
Mrs. Young came to the Huntington School District in 1987 and has worked at Flower Hill, Huntington El, and Jefferson and for the last ten years, Southdown. She's toiled under many different principals and superintendents, seen colleagues come and go and watched fads take hold and later fizzle.
Through the years Mrs. Young has gone about her business in a professional and almost understated kind of way, establishing cordial and nurturing relationships with students and fellow faculty members and always giving the youngsters she came into contact with her best effort on any given day.
Mrs. Young earned a bachelor's degree at Syracuse University in 1969 after "having spent only my last year of college there, because I had transferred from St. Lawrence University in the far north of New York in order to marry my college sweetheart, who was attending Syracuse Law School," she said last week and her husband, Gordon.
"After we both graduated, he had to serve two years in the U.S. Army and was fortunate to be assigned to Washington, D.C., where I attended George Washington University, getting an M.A. in secondary education and was permanent certification to teach English in New York," Mrs. Young said.
The soon-to-be-retiree ended up in Huntington, more than 400 miles from her childhood home outside of Buffalo. "We moved to Long Island because my husband had grown up in Massapequa," she said. "We had three children within five years."
When Mrs. Young was finally ready to begin her teaching career, her own children were enrolled in the Huntington School District and her interest had shifted from secondary to elementary grade level education.
Soon enough Mrs. Young learned that all she needed was to complete two college reading courses and she could obtain an elementary teaching certificate. "That's probably not true today, but it worked for me," she said.
Her first "real" teaching job saw her filling in as a leave replacement in a second grade classroom in Half Hollow Hills. She followed that stint with a two year run at the Long Island School for the Gifted. In 1987 Mrs. Young came to Huntington and has become a mainstay on the elementary level. She has taught math for 15 years at Flower Hill, Huntington El and now Southdown, second grade for five years at Jefferson and third grade at Huntington El for three years.
"I have so many special memories of students and colleagues and I probably will realize in the coming years that I miss both more than I can even imagine now," Mrs. Young said. Her last year as a regular classroom teacher came in 2000 at Jefferson School when she led a second grade class. She was transferred to Southdown for the following year and has been at that school ever since.
Although more than a decade has passed since she worked with the Jefferson second graders, the youngsters left an indelible mark on Mrs. Young. "They were my favorite group of students - is a teacher allowed to admit this - even before they selected me last year when they were seniors as one of their distinguished teachers," she said.
Mrs. Young was referring to a dinner at Huntington High School that honored the top seniors in the Class of 2010. The teenagers who started school at Jefferson chose Mrs. Young as their "distinguished teacher" and she was also honored at the dinner.
It had been many years since Mrs. Young laid eyes on most of those students. "I was so happy to see so many of them go on to be in the top ten percent of the class and to still remember me," she said.
The past ten years at Southdown "have been so enjoyable and rewarding because of the friendliness of my fellow teachers, most of whom I didn't know when I came here and because of the atmosphere of support, respect, and genuine invitation that radiates from Shelly Marino," Mrs. Young said. "I consider myself lucky that I can retire on such a high note."
Losing Mrs. Young is a blow to Southdown's faculty, but she has touched the lives and careers of many young teachers and her spirit will carry on at the school. The group will miss their colleague and so will students.
"Two things I look forward to doing in retirement is traveling in the fall and the spring when there won't be so much competition for airline seats and hotel rooms, and skiing in Colorado with my granddaughter when she has a school vacation in March instead of during our school vacation in February when she could only ski on the weekend," Mrs. Young said.
It will probably take a little bit of time for Mrs. Young to settle into retirement if she is anything like most people. "I'm not sure what else I'll be doing, but I'm looking forward to figuring that out," she said