These Fall River area educators all went back to teach at their alma maters. Here's why.
Before they were through with college, Tony Rodrigues and Chris Kenyon both had a notion they would return to their respective high schools to teach. For Dave Belliveau and Alyssa (Dias) Shea, the same trip was not so direct, nor so likely.
Rodrigues (BMC Durfee), Kenyon (Joseph Case), Belliveau (Diman Regional Voc-Tech) and Shea (Atlantis Charter) all recently talked to The Herald News about returning to their respective alma maters as high school teachers, how it happened and what the experience has been like.
A few notes on a couple of our subjects. Belliveau retired from Diman Regional's Drafting Shop at the end of the 2021 school year, but he can still be found working the basketball scorebook during the winter sports season. Shea is a graduate of the Atlantis Charter elementary school but not the high school; Atlantis had not yet established its high school when she graduated Grade 8, in 2006. She subsequently graduated from Bristol County Agricultural High School.
Tony Rodrigues
A 1987 graduate of B.M.C. Durfee High School, Rodrigues returned to Elsbree Street no so long after and has taught world languages full-time since the 1992-93 school year. He did his teacher observation at Durfee. He did his student teaching at Durfee.
In December of the previous school year, Rodrigues became a full-time substitute for teacher Gail Squillace, who was seriously ill. She died in April and Rodrigues finished the year.
Rodrigues' family immigrated to Fall River in 1985, from the island of Terceira in the Azores. By the time he settled in Fall River, he had already learned French and German in his Azores school and had picked up accent-free English hanging out with American friends from the nearby United States Air base on Terceira.
Portuguese language teacher at Durfee
Rodrigues teaches Portuguese. He has taught Spanish, too. He's very much part of the Durfee community. This spring, he's accompanying 27 Hilltopper students on a school trip to Porto, Portugal. He's done previous overseas school trips to the Azores and Lisbon, and shorter trips to Montreal and Washington D.C. He's been very involved with school proms.
“Durfee was my second home, and it still is to this day,” said Rodrigues, 55, a former Durfee High soccer player. “I hate when people talk trash about Durfee. The positives outlast the negatives 100 to 1.”
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Rodrigues said that over the course of his teaching career, he's had opportunities to move to other school systems for pay increases of $5,000 to $6,000. The temptation to jump has never been overwhelming. “I know my community. I stuck it out,” he said. “I always wanted to finish my career here, and it's coming soon.”
One of more than 50 Durfee teachers who are also Durfee grads, Rodrigues said the 2023-24 school year could be his last, though that's not set.
Still, it's easy to remember when that career was just starting. After Durfee, he attended Southeastern Massachusetts University where, he said, he realized teaching world language was his calling. Following his pronged fill-in stint in 1992, Rodrigues was hired by then-Principal Albert Attar.
That made him colleagues with those who just a few years earlier had taught him. Among those new colleagues in the World Languages Department, Paul Grillo, Joseph Reis and William Reis were especially helpful mentors. Rodrigues had student taught under Reis.
“He threw me to the wolves the second week,” he recalled. “It was good.”
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Chris Kenyon
A 2006 graduate of Joseph Case High School in Swansea, Kenyon has been a full-time mathematics teacher since the fall of 2010. At Case, athletics was his extra-curricular realm, as he competed in golf, basketball, track and field and his favorite sport, baseball.
Eight months or so before starting his college career at Bridgewater State University, Kenyon was focused on a career in education and had a strong notion where he would do it.
“I'd say probably by Christmas time (senior year), I knew I would teach,” he said. “And I had a special place in my heart for Case.”
The stepping stones for that journey from Case student to Case teacher fell right into place. He substitute taught at Case and impressed so well that, in 2009, Case's mathematics department head, Joann Lambert, asked him to fill in for a teacher for three weeks, during Bridgewater State's Christmas break. Kenyon enjoyed and valued the experience.
He student taught at Case in 2010 and, after that was completed, he substituted again, his Monday-Wednesday-Friday college schedule allowing him to work two days a week. Subbing and student teaching put Kenyon in a position of authority over students whom he had attended Case with and, in some situations, had gotten to know well, especially through sports.
“It was different,” he said. “My brother Brendan (4 years younger) was a senior and his friends were coming by saying, 'Hi Chris.' I had to tell them, 'No, it's Mr. Kenyon.'"
And then there was the experience of suddenly being a peer of the teachers who had fairly recently been his superiors. “Teachers were always very welcoming,” he said. “My department head, I had as a teacher twice. I didn't want to let her down. I was afraid she'd think I was still a kid.”
It didn't take long before Kenyon was recognized as a valued member of the Case staff. He attained his administrative license and interned in the school office. In 2018, then-Principal Brian McCann asked Kenyon to be co-chair of accreditation committee on behalf of the faculty.
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The school store at Case
At a staff developmental meeting one January, with the floor open to ideas, Kenyon suggested a school store. McCann and then-assistant principal Chris Costa told him go for it, see what you can do. The store, selling Case gear and staffed by about 35 students, opened the next fall and continues to operate.
Asked to contrast Case then and now, Kenyon said the complexion of the school's extra-curricular face has evolved where there is more crossover, students participating in multiple areas – drama, music, clubs, athletics. “For 350 students to have your back, it's great,” he said.
Kenyon said that while a new career in administration might be in the future, when his children are no longer young, his present gig still floats his boat.
“It's been fantastic,” he said. “I guess I bleed maroon and gold.”
Dave Belliveau
Unlike Rodrigues and Kenyon, Belliveau's post-grad (Diman, Bristol Community College) plans absolutely, positively did not involve returning to his alma mater on Stonehaven Road to teach. “I was not even thinking about it,” Belliveau said recently from his Swansea home.
Belliveau's early adulthood plans involved making some good bucks in the private sector. And he was on track. A member of arguably the best boys' basketball team in Diman history (1978-79, 14-6 record), Belliveau, who also played basketball at BCC, earned his associate's degree and landed a job with United Engineers which was building the nuclear power plant in Seabrook, New Hampshire. He lived near Seabrook during the week and returned home for the weekends.
One infamous Friday, two weeks before Belliveau's wedding, United Engineers announced it was laying off 9,000 workers. Because rumors had already been flying about imminent mass layoffs, Belliveau (he pronounces it bella-view) had already started a mass resume send-out and was soon hired by Kona Corporation, a small plastics company in Gloucester. He and wife Martha moved to Gloucester.
Kona did not stay small for long. “It grew and grew,” he said.
Belliveau worked for Kona for five-and-a-half years. He felt well compensated but, along with Martha, then a nurse at Beverly Hospital, also felt homesick. Friends and family, he said, treated anything north of Boston like it was another continent. Few visitors. They were detached.
In 1988, Belliveau heard there was a teacher's position open at Diman. Curious and a little hopeful, he applied. Diman wanted him, but “The money was pretty pathetic,” he said. “I needed more money.”
Landing a job in the Drafting Shop at Diman
A year later, Belliveau said, the secretary of the Diman superintendent contacted him to see if he was still interested, there was a technical drawing position open in the Drafting Shop. “They were offering a lot more money – it was still pathetic – but I wanted to come back,” he said.
Return he did in 1989, with his wife quickly securing a job at Charlton Memorial Hospital.
Belliveau taught technical drawing for four years and then switched to drafting instructor, a position he held for the balance of his Diman career. He doubled as drafting department head – succeeding John Cantwell – for eight years before giving up that post because, he said, he loved the teaching but did not love the paperwork involved with heading the department.
Along the way, he coached boys' basketball, freshman for four years and junior varsity for five. After he hung up the whistle, he moved to the Diman basketball scoring table and still holds that part-time winter gig. One of his score table trademarks has been the clear plastic labels he creates for the Diman player lineup. The labels fit perfectly into the scorebook spaces.
Belliveau said that during his years of teaching and coaching at Diman, something a student did or said would flash him back to his own high school years. All the drafting work the students now do is computerized. The T-squares and rulers and paper and pencils Belliveau used as a student have either been thrown away or tucked in a closet.
But there remained connections to the 1970s. Belliveau said that in his teaching days, he used for his students projects and drawings from his former teachers, people like Lester Raymond and Gordon Pratt. “I used them for my kids because they were good projects,” he said.
His son Thomas, 30, graduated from Diman's Carpentry Shop in 2011 and his daughter Megan, 36 and a Case High and UMass Dartmouth grad, subbed at Diman for two years and then taught English there for three. She still works in education.
Belliveau, now 62, is self-employed. For years, he's done architectural design drawings for local homeowners and contractors. He retired from Diman with 32 years of teaching in his personal scorebook. Working the basketball games keeps him connected to the school he embraced as both a student and educator – and parent.
“If you had told me that I'd be a teacher, when I was I high school, I'd have said, 'No. You're crazy,''' Belliveau said. “But it worked out for the best.”
Alyssa (Dias) Shea
These days, as a special education paraprofessional at the Atlantis Charter High School in Fall River's south end, Alyssa Shea loves teaching chemistry. Loves it. Which is ironic. Note the similarity of what she says to what Belliveau just said earlier in this article.
“If you had told me I'd be a chemistry teacher, I'd have said you're crazy,” Shea said. “I hated chemistry. But I love it now. I work with an awesome teacher, Jodie Fernandes. She makes chemistry so easy to understand.”
Number Shea among those who enthusiastically come to work each day. Her four children, all boys, come to school with her. They're in grades 7, 5 and 4, with the youngest in the day care Atlantis provides for its staff. “it's very heartwarming,” she said. “I feel like it's a privilege to go to charter school. It's totally different than public schools. Smaller class sizes. You have time to check up on the kids.”
Following her 2006 graduation from the Atlantis elementary school, at Bristol Agricultural High School, she studied landscaping. Post high school, Shea worked as a behavior analyst, helping autistic children, for two private businesses. She had also worked with youth who had trauma histories and intellectual and emotional challenges.
One of her sons' teachers, also a friend of hers, clued Shea in about the SPED job at the high school opening at Atlantis. She applied. Atlantis liked what they saw and invited her into the family.
Through the years since Shea had attended Atlantis to her hiring, some of the former elementary teachers had migrated to the high school, launched in 2017. Gabriela Birmingham, the K-12 District Leader, was Shea's guidance counselor.
Her first work day at Atlantis Charter was Aug. 22 of last year.
“I was nervous. I didn't know what to expect,” she said. “Some of the teachers there were my teachers when I was there. It's tough calling them by their first names. I still use last names.”
Her nervousness about the new peer relationships, completely understandable, was unfounded. Shea said she was welcomed into the teaching family, no more so than by her former sixth-grade English teacher, Stacey Denomme.
“She was so excited to tell people I was her student,” Shea said. “So happy she was yelling it out in the hallway. She is amazing. She looks exactly the same as she did when I was a kid.”
This article originally appeared on The Herald News: Teachers Appreciation Day in Greater Fall River
