Teacher retires from same school she attended

Editor’s note: This is part of a series the Bigfork Eagle is doing to highlight the careers of seven staff members retiring from the Bigfork School District at the end of the 2011-12 school year. The Eagle will run an article featuring a different retiring staff member each week.

Terry Gross spent the last 37 years teaching elementary school students at the same school she grew up in.

Except back then Bigfork Elementary School was a little brown schoolhouse with one class of 18-20 students per grade. Now it’s a multi-level school with three classes of 20-30 for each grade.

And way back when, the town was a place where everybody knew everybody.

“When I graduated from high school, I knew every soul I ran into,” Gross said. “The biggest change is that you don’t know everybody you meet.”

Gross graduated in 1968, moved on to the University of Montana to get a bachelor’s degree, spent two years teaching in Corvallis and moved back to Bigfork after she got married to her husband Lynn.

Through her years of teaching Gross taught first-, second- and third-grade. She has seen some of the kids she’s taught grow-up and become adults, have kids, and now she teaches those kids. Three of the teachers on staff were once students of hers.

This year’s class is a second-grade class with 17 boys and five girls. It’s high-energy and it will be the last class she teaches because Gross is retiring at the end of the school year.

“I think the first thing I’m going to do is nothing,” Gross said with a laugh. “After 40 years of chasing after seven- and eight-year-olds I need a rest.”

And throughout those 40 years, Gross spent little time with just one job.

“I always had this job and something else,” she said.

After working with kids all day, Gross often spent her nights and weekends waitressing, selling real estate, being a nanny recruiter, tutoring or as a private care-giver for a stroke patient.

She said it’s only in the last two years she’s taken the time to herself. And that’s mostly because she now has grandchildren, who she plans on spending a lot of time with after she retires.

“The most important thing that has happened is that I’m a grandma,” she said. “It’s so much different as a grandparent than a parent.”

She said now she has the time to sit back and be amazed by the “babies,” rather than be busy with the day-to-day raising and caring for them.

She raised two children in Bigfork and now has two granddaughters aged two and four who live in Missoula.

She can’t wait.

“They’re the cutest babies in town,” she said.