TUNBRIDGE — At last month’s eighth-grade graduation at the Tunbridge Central School, the school gave out a new award in memory of Rachel Brown.
The award aims to recognize those who, like Brown, inspire students and are compassionate, giving, approachable, loving and understanding “above and beyond the classroom,” as the award plaque says.
Brown, who died of brain cancer on May 30 at 49, left a deep mark on the community of the school where she taught first grade for 11 years. Not only did she teach students to read and do math, but she also taught them to skate, grow vegetables and enjoy the outdoors.
She took care of students’ basic needs, with a ready stash of snacks and clothing for students who might come to school without them. If students were struggling with attendance or being disruptive in class, Brown sought to understand the reason behind the absences or behaviors and help to address the root cause.
“She also made her class the island in the storm for a lot of kids,” said Liz York, whose two children Margaret and Asa Williams, now 13 and 10, were in Brown’s class. “Her classroom for a lot of kids was the one stable thing in their lives. She would gripe if she had to miss a day of school.”
It took a seizure at a gas station on her way to work one day in 2018 to keep Brown away from the school and her students. Subsequent scans found the cancer. Though surgery, chemotherapy and radiation kept the disease at bay for a couple of years, her health didn’t allow her to return to teaching.
But even while she was home on medical leave, she still took the time to send old pictures to children and their families, said York, who also served as a parent volunteer in Brown’s class and is a former school board member.
“She was in the fight for her life and she was still thinking of her kids (and) the families,” York said.
Brown demonstrated resilience and a desire to learn from a young age. Born in 1971 on a naval base in Portsmouth, Va., to Stephen and Debra Colwell, from birth she faced a series of infections in her throat which required repeated surgeries and meant that she didn’t learn to speak through therapy until she was 8 years old.
Brown was the oldest of four siblings. The family bounced around a bit following Stephen Colwell’s jobs in the restaurant industry after he left the Navy. They spent time in Otego, N.Y., and Point Pleasant Beach, N.J. After high school, she attended Glassboro (N.J.) State College, now Rowan University, and Georgian Court College in Lakewood, N.J.
She earned her bachelor’s degree from Norwich University, graduating in 1996, the same year her son Nicholas Bradley was born. Her daughter Alexandra Bradley followed in 2002.
She and her children’s father Sean Bradley later split up, and she worked as a server at the Norwich Inn while earning her teaching certificate from the Upper Valley Educators Institute. She completed the certificate in 2007, the same year she married Rick Brown, an electrician for the city of Lebanon. They made their home in Wilder.
“Going through what she had to go through in life, all these obstacles, (she) still came out with a wonderful life,” Rick Brown said. She “didn’t want to be rich and all this stuff. Just happy. Everything she worked for she got. It’s inspiring.”
Brown’s work and home life intersected often. Because her daughter Alex’s school vacation schedule didn’t match up with Tunbridge’s, Alex would often accompany her to the school.
When Scott Farnsworth took the principal post at the Tunbridge school in 2015, a post he held until 2018, he initially was uncertain about how Brown would manage caring for her own daughter while teaching a class full of first-graders.
“I never said no,” he said. “I kind of hesitated, I guess.”
But he came around when he saw that Brown “knew how the kids reacted to Alex.”
She told the students stories about Alex and the rest of her family so that by the time Alex arrived in the classroom she had become a celebrity. York said her daughter Margaret would always report to her when Alex had visited the class. Having an older child reading to the younger ones, and being poised and confident was “just one more gift,” Brown gave to her students, York said.
Her teaching skills also came in handy at home. Alex, who has dyslexia, initially had trouble learning to read. Her mother gave her extra work to do over the summers.
“I was awful at reading,” said Alex, who will be a senior at Lebanon High School in the fall. “Now I love it and I’m great at it. She was a really great teacher.”
In addition to sharing her daughter with her students, Brown would also bring in things from home to help with various school projects. One year, classes at the school competed to see who could build the fastest sled to carry each member of the class down a hill by the school. For that, Alex said Brown brought in a plastic table cover they used for birthday parties to attach to the bottom of the sled. She also brought in some Pam cooking spray to further reduce the sled’s friction, which Alex noted might have been “a little bit of cheating.”
Farnsworth also remembered this competition, which Brown’s class won. “She just wanted to give the kids this thrill,” he said.
But she also enjoyed such activities herself. She was known for her costumes and helping to decorate the gym for the end-of-year 8th grade dance.
“She was just incredible at that,” said Tracy Vesper, the school’s administrative assistant.
Brown could fold napkins into whatever shape required to match the theme of the year’s dance, be it Star Wars, Wizard of Oz or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Vesper said.
While some teachers might feel they need to keep a distance between themselves and their students, Brown would join in in whatever activity the kids were doing, said Chelsey Hook, who shared a first and second grade class with Brown for a few years when they both were teaching at Tunbridge.
It’s “hard for some people (who) don’t want to be seen as goofy (or) not look like an adult,” Hook said. “She always did it to have fun with them.”
She brought her dog and rabbits to class on occasion, and on at least one occasion took a pet home from school. During one of the school’s annual trips to the Tunbridge World’s Fair, Brown boarded the bus with something under her shirt. One of her students quickly informed the rest of the bus riders that Mrs. Brown had acquired a baby bunny that day.
“Her students loved that,” said Elizabeth Dutton, who teaches kindergarten at Tunbridge.
Brown developed close friendships with many of her colleagues. When Hook injured her knee playing basketball with some of the students, the Browns hosted Hook and her 3-year-old son at their home for a couple of weeks. Later, after Hook had two more children, Brown would watch them while she did her grocery shopping at the stores in West Lebanon.
“She would help me out whenever I needed it,” Hook said.
Like Hook, Dutton also counted Brown as a friend. Dutton said she and Brown would sometimes sit and talk for hours after school as they prepared for the next day’s lessons. Dutton said Brown could always make her laugh with her sarcastic humor.
Though Brown was soft spoken, she had the ability to influence the people around her. She made a point of going out to meet parents outside in the morning and the afternoon each day, Vesper said. And she shared her enthusiasm for the students and their work with Vesper, coming into her office at the end of the week and asking Vesper to guess which student’s work she was showing her.
“You couldn’t help but have a more close relationship with the kids because she made them real to you,” Vesper said.
Brown continued to support children, even after they left Tunbridge school. When students would leave Tunbridge and go to other schools, sometimes in the middle of the year, she would organize the other students to write them letters to remind them that “they had a place in Tunbridge,” York said.
“She didn’t have to do that,” York said. “Most people do not think in those terms.”
While Brown considered going elsewhere for a shorter commute and more money, and even applied for other jobs, she stayed in Tunbridge throughout her teaching career. It gave her the chance to get to know families by having siblings and watching them as they progressed through the grades, and to engage them in the activities both she and they enjoyed such as gardening, hiking, ice skating and dressing up.
“Not everybody could be a teacher in a rural school,” Farnsworth said. “When you kind of find your groove, you get the most out of it. She put everything into it.”
She did with the sledding competition what she did in all her interactions with students, whether it be reading, writing or the arts, Farnsworth said.
“She was in it to win it,” he said.
Nora Doyle-Burr can be reached at ndoyleburr@vnews.com or 603-727-3213.
