SEQUIM — The last day of school for Sequim School District students also was the end of an era for a teaching couple who helped children read and write, learn math facts and life lessons.
Husband and wife Eric Danielson and Christine MacDougall Danielson retired on June 12 after 30-plus years of teaching.
While there have been some difficulties, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, Eric said that, by his estimate, he’s gotten to know about 1,000 students and their families through the years.
“In the later stages, you get the children of your former students,” he said.
“If I hadn’t retired, I would have had a grandchild of a former student,” Christine joked.
For their final year of teaching, Eric retired as a fifth-grade teacher and Christine as the reading specialist at Helen Haller Elementary School (HHE).
Eric taught all of his 31 years at Helen Haller, with one year of leave when their son Lane was 17 months old. He even did his student teaching at the school with now-retired fourth-grade teacher John Bridge.
Eric mostly taught fourth and fifth grades with a few years as a math teacher and writing coach, he said.
Christine taught one year in Darrington before she moved to teach second grade in 1987 at Helen Haller. She worked there for four years before transferring to Greywolf Elementary, where she spent the next 12 years teaching kindergarten, first grade and second grade.
Christine finished her career at HHE teaching first and second grade before retiring as the reading specialist. She took two one-year leaves of absence for the birth of her children, Lane, now 26 and a doctor, and Quinn, now 23.
Meet in the middle
Sequim seemed to become a middle ground for the couple as Eric is from Port Townsend and Christine from Port Angeles.
They didn’t meet, Eric said, until a school in-service day in the Greywolf Library in 1995.
“There were some other teachers working in the background to make that happen,” he said.
Both went on different paths to become teachers.
Christine said when she was a girl, she’d play Barbies with her best friend, and they’d have their dolls become nurses and teachers.
“Well, my best friend became a nurse, and I became a teacher,” she said.
Eric said many of his relatives from Sweden are teachers, but after he graduated from college, he didn’t feel that was something he wanted to do. However, while working for a sporting goods company that sold to teachers, Eric said he found himself interacting with many of them, and that led him to get to know them better and follow a new career path.
Book room and scholarships
Looking back on their careers, the couple had a few things they were particularly proud of along with helping so many children academically.
Christine helped introduce a book room for staffers where they could access book sets for groups of children based on their reading levels. Eric introduced a senior scholarship through the Helen Haller Elementary Parent Teacher Organization (PTO) for students who had gone to the school for at least three years.
It started with one scholarship a year for $250, he said, and now it’s given to two seniors for $500 each, with updated requirements.
Following his retirement, Eric said third-grade teacher Taleah Burr will be leading the scholarship with support from the Sequim Elementary PTA that helps both HHE and Greywolf students.
A few parting stories
Since 2018, Eric has commuted to school on his bicycle. On some mornings, he’d get “Mr. D’d,” where current and past students would roll down their car windows and shout the greeting. He always waves, but they’re often going by so quickly that it’s hard to see who was saying hello, he said.
The couple also shared their yogurt fashion story.
Not long after they got married, Christine was wearing an outfit that Eric said looked like a pair of sweatpants.
“It was stylish at the time,” she said.
“I asked, ‘Are you going to wear that?’” Eric said.
And while talking, he took the lid off his yogurt cup and, through a weird mishap, got yogurt on Christine’s outfit.
She went to school and later told her students jokingly that she had an outfit on and her husband didn’t like it so much that he spilled yogurt on it.
Months passed, and out of the blue, the couple said, one of Christine’s students raised his hand and asked if the pants she was wearing were the yogurt pants her husband hated.
She confirmed they were, to which the boy replied, “’cause those are really ugly.”
“I never wore it again,” Christine said.
And fondly noting the spontaneity of children, Eric recalled being asked about money by a student.
“Just in the middle of a lesson, I was asked out of the blue, ‘Mr. D what do you do when you need money?’” Eric said.
“‘I’m married, so I just ask my wife,’ and then another kid blurted out, ‘My dad too!’”
Retirement
Eric and Christine said they plan to stay in Sequim for the next few months before they do some traveling. They have plans in September to go to Oregon, Utah and Arizona, where they’ll visit their son.
“We have some time to wander,” Eric said.
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Matthew Nash is a reporter with the Olympic Peninsula News Group, which is composed of Sound Publishing newspapers Peninsula Daily News, Sequim Gazette and Forks Forum. He can be reached by email at matthew.nash@sequimgazette.com.
