CLASS ACT DISTRICT TAPS TEACHER OF THE YEAR.

Byline: Karen Maeshiro Staff Writer

QUARTZ HILL - Teaching special education kindergartners is demanding physically, emotionally and mentally, but teacher Elizabeth Curtiss volunteered to take it on this year at Quartz Hill Elementary.

Curtiss, who majored in elementary and special education, has worked on an American Indian reservation with special education high school students, and with bilingual special education third-graders in Arizona.

``She's dealing with some severe children and doing just a fabulous job,'' Principal Shelly Dearinger said. ``She uses techniques that are effective for them, like sign language. Some of the kids there are autistic and are nonverbal. Sign language is really effective for them.''

Curtiss, who taught for three years at Neenach School before moving over to Quartz Hill Elementary, has been named Westside Union School District's Teacher of the Year.

At the kindergarten-through-fifth-grade Neenach School, staff there say they miss Curtiss, who was instrumental in staging elaborate student productions and a schoolwide Dr. Seuss Day.

Curtiss' students in her kindergarten classes also hatched chicks and made bread.

Laura Welsh, a parent and instructional aide at Neenach, said she was sorry to see Curtiss move to the Quartz Hill campus.

``I thought she was a wonderful teacher. I think she had a lot of compassion for the children. She was very dedicated in her teaching, and she took time to explain things to them so that they could understand,'' Welsh said. ``The kids loved her. They were always hugging her. It was just a feeling you got when you were in her classroom. She was a kind person.''

The student performances that Curtiss organized had costumes, props and musical numbers and involved the entire school, school officials said.

``I've never seen better,'' Dearinger said.

Curtiss also came up with a campuswide Dr. Seuss Day at Neenach to celebrate the famed children's author's birthday.

Children read Dr. Seuss stories in one classroom, while in another, students made ``oobleck'' - a gooey substance with magical properties from the story, ``Bartholomew and the Oobleck'' - out of cornstarch and water. Students also made hats in honor of another Seuss tale, ``The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins,'' and staff voted for the best hat.

Welsh's husband dressed up as the Cat in the Hat character and walked around the school.

``I really enjoy being excited to come to work every day, to see the little light in their eyes when they catch onto something,'' Curtiss said. ``Because I teach kindergartners, I'm guaranteed a hug every day, several of them. I'm really privileged to work in a school district where I can explore what I like to do.''

Curtiss, 30, at first did not think of teaching as a career. She said she went through a ``rebellious'' stage as a teen-ager and dabbled in art but decided to go back to school after she taught in a preschool and found ``that's where I needed to be.''

Curtiss had previously worked caring for the elderly, several of whom died or had become so ill that they had to be transferred to a nursing home.

``So when I went to work with preschoolers, their life energy and endless possibilities really made me very excited to be teaching and to be working with them,'' Curtiss said. ``I just had a great experience. I worked with special needs preschoolers there, too. They were placed there because no other preschool would take them.''

Curtiss obtained her bachelor's degree in elementary and special education from Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff.

Before being hired by the Westside district, she was one of five students selected from her university to be part of a rural multicultural training group.

``It was a special program through the university where I lived on a Navajo reservation for a semester and worked with special needs high school kids,'' Curtiss said.

Over a winter break, she lived with a family in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and enrolled in classes at an institute for multicultural and language studies. In Yuma, Ariz., she worked with third-grade bilingual students with special needs.

Curtiss came to the Antelope Valley through happenstance. She came out to a teacher job fair at Antelope Valley High School with some friends in 1997, not looking for a job but just to practice interviewing skills.

A few months later, Curtiss got a phone call from Dearinger, then principal at Neenach, who offered Curtiss a job that she could not turn down - teaching 11 kindergartners at the small rural school in the west Antelope Valley.

``I remembered her and really wanted her. I could just tell she was genuine. I could tell she would devote everything to children and be a positive impact in children's lives,'' Dearinger said. ``She quickly develops rapport with students, and they can trust her. And she's firm but loving, and I think that's really the key.''

Curtiss grew up in Tucson, Ariz., where her father is a pediatrician and her mother a retired leasing agent for a retirement community. Curtiss has two cats, one named Saltomoncita, which means grasshopper in Castillian Spanish, and the other is called Besitos, which means little kisses.

CAPTION(S):

2 photos

Photo:

(1 -- color) Special needs instructor Elizabeth Curtiss has been named Teacher of the Year by the Westside Union School District.

(2 -- color) Elizabeth Curtiss talks with Pete Fasano, 5, and demonstrates the warmth that helped win her the Teacher of the Year award in the Westside district.

Jeff Goldwater/Staff Photographer