Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
Jennings volunteer
Armeda Hayer has seniority at Jennings Elementary in Colfax. At age 90, she serves as a volunteer reading helper for a kindergarten class two days per week.
Her interest began a long time ago with a daughter who struggled with reading.
“Somehow I could not help her,” said Hayer.
Beginning in 2005 with Connie McBride’s third-grade class, Hayer soon started to worry that she would catch a cold or flu from the students and spread it to her husband Laurence, who had heart problems.
“So I quit doing that. It seemed reasonable to me,” said Hayer.
A year later, her husband died.
Left alone on a 13-acre property east of Colfax, Hayer soon made a change.
“They say a widow is to stay in place for a year, but I needed people,” she said.
After selling the land, Hayer moved into the Wheatland Arms apartment building in Colfax and returned to volunteering at the school in 2008.
She was back with McBride until the longtime teacher retired, then with Carol Meyers’ second grade class and then her third.
Lori Brown took over the second grade in 2013 and Hayer has been with her since, moving with her to kindergarten.
“She is amazing,” Brown said. “She is an awesome lady.”
“I’ve been demoted: third grade, second grade, kindergarten,” said Hayer, whom the kids call ‘Grandma.’
At ages 5 and 6, kindergartners are just learning to read, using stapled letter books depicting letters and sounds.
Students visit with Armeda one-on-one and then seal their books back into a Zip-Loc bag.
“I used to give each student five minutes but later realized the time isn’t best spent that way,” Hayer said. “If they read very well, they don’t get much time. It’s where they are, what level in their learning. In the kindergarten age, they don’t resent it if one child gets to read with Grandma longer than another. They don’t.”
She teaches sometimes with flash cards, other times not.
“A long A, a short A, so you teach them that,” Hayer said. “The word ‘name,’ that is a long A. It’s by repetition. It’s just repeating until it gets in their little minds.”
She sees a range of reading ability, starting from the first days of a new school year.
“Every class has a child that can read well,” she said. “Whether it’s their natural ability or their parents turned off the T.V… But shows like ‘Dora the Explorer’ are helpful. So I’m not knocking TV.”
Hayer changed to all day from half day for the current school year.
“Just this year I just decided, ‘Come on old girl, as long as you’re there, make a whole day of it,” she said.
This was after Hayer fell and broke her hip last summer. Now she uses a rolling walker, going up and down Jennings hallways to rebuild her strength. She gets to the school by Coast Transportation.
At lunchtime she goes to the teacher’s lounge. The school provides her lunch.
“I eat what the kids eat,” Hayer said. “The teachers all sit around eating their salads and their skinny food.”
She began her own schooling as a six-year-old in 1930, riding a horse from her parents’ farm two miles to the one-room Irene School southwest of Pullman.
“Would I put a six-year-old on a horse to go two miles?” she said. “Would you?”
Sometimes on the way to school, the horse would turn back and return to the farm.
“Dad would slap it on the rump and away we’d go again,” Hayer said.
After she began high school at Pullman High her family moved from their leased land to a new plot they bought near Colfax. She graduated from Colfax High School in 1942.
Hayer met her husband when she was 25, during the summer after her sophomore year at College of Puget Sound, (now University of Puget Sound) studying Occupational Therapy. She had first worked in secretarial jobs out of high school.
She and Laurence met at his sister and brother-in-law’s house. Hayer’s brother-in-law had known Laurence in Minnesota and had encouraged him to come out to Washington.
Laurence worked on a farm down the road from where Armeda worked in the kitchen of another farm.
“By October we were married,” she said.
Then she stopped going to college.
“It was a five-year program, and I thought, by the time I finish, I will be really, really old,” Hayer said.
The couple had two daughters, and both graduated from Oakesdale High School.
Today, Armeda is one of six regular, non-parent volunteers at Jennings Elementary, along with five regular parent volunteers. Coming in for various events throughout the year are 42 Parent-Teacher Organization (PTO) room parents.
“It’s hard to put into words,” Hayer said. “But to me this is almost a mission. A person wants to do volunteer work, to me the school was the way to go.”
Garth Meyer is a former Whitman County Gazette reporter.
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