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Some teachers - and students - you never forget

Joye Brown

July 6, 2008

It reads, almost, like a poem:

"The only teacher that can climb a tree; the only teacher that can teach like no other teacher can; the only teacher who can let a student stay after school for fun ... the only teacher who gives you another chance.

"Love, Dennis C., Terrance W. and whoever we forgot."

The words are from a letter written almost four decades ago by boys in Kathleen Leahy's second-grade class at Bicycle Path School in Middle Island.

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For years, Leahy treasured the words. And memories of the children who wrote them.

They were in the first class she ever taught.

Flash forward, 34 years.

It's September and Leahy is greeting an excitable cluster of juniors at Longwood High School. They're in ninth-period English, on the first day of classes.

The last class, Leahy knows, she will ever teach.

"She told us on day one that we were special, and that she was going to be retiring," said Katelyn Murray. "And she was pretty emotional about it."

Leahy, who teaches Holocaust and genocide studies at the school, also told them of her quest to have a boy from her first class join members of her last class, in June.

But she had to find the letter's surviving author, Dennis Carman, first.

"I went right to the Internet," Leahy said.

She found a number and put in a call, telling the nice man who answered that she was Dennis' teacher and wanted to talk to him.

"She got my brother, Chet," Dennis told me yesterday. "And he thought she was a teacher looking for my son, Dennis."

It took seconds for Dennis to agree to visit Miss Leahy's class.

"I was pretty happy, because I had been thinking about her on and off for a few years," he said. "I might have been a bit of a troublemaker, but she was always very nice. She would always take you by the hand and say, 'Listen, young man, you need to go in this direction.'"

Dennis made good on his promise by visiting Miss Leahy, during ninth-period - the last class, on the last day of school, before she retired.

She dressed up.

Dennis wore his Suffolk County sheriff's department uniform.