Marilee Linder is retiring from teaching at Sunshine Elementary for almost three decades. Photo by Mel Toadvine

The students are all gone this week as classes ended Friday, June 10. But there are still a few teachers and office personnel on duty and especially one teacher, who says she is spending this week clearing out her classroom at Sunshine Elementary School.

She is Marilee Lindner who at age 74 is calling it quits after teaching for almost three decades at the same school.

On Thursday, Lindner was given a big party after the students had left for home. The cafeteria at Sunshine Elementary School was filled with teachers, friends, relatives, parents, and former teachers, all there to say good-bye to a woman for whom they have come to respect because of her love for teaching and her love for children.

Some may call her teaching the way teaching should be and now that Lindner is retiring, she is not afraid to say today’s rules for teachers of kindergarten students are too mired with “tests, tests, and more tests” and she put it.

“It’s all because of the FCAT tests that other teachers will tell you that they are teaching to. Here in kindergarten, it is not the place to test these very young children almost every day of the week,” she said.

Congratulations to Retired Teacher: Sunshine School officials and others offer congratulations to Marilee Linder who retired last week from teaching kindergarten at age 74.

Instead, she used common sense approaches to teaching, like teaching was meant to be instead of today’s powers to be who dictate that the children must be tested over and over and over.

Instead, Marilee Lindner used what today could be called unconventional means to teach her kids, and now by her own estimate, she has probably taught close to a thousand students over the years, all in the kindergarten class, just before the first grade.

She uses a guitar that she has had for several years to teach them music. She plays the piano and uses that in her lessons. She teaches them how to raise food on the outside of her classroom. She teaches them vocabulary and makes it all fun.

She has been a fixture in the Kindergarten Department at Sunshine elementary School for a very long time, as her husband says.

He was at the retirement party last Thursday and spoke briefly about his wife and how devoted she has been to teaching.

Lindner with guitar: Here she poses with the famous guitar that she has used in the classroom ever since she first started teaching kindergarten students at Sunshine Elementary School.

At age 74, she has gone well past the age that most teachers retire and start collecting their pensions. Not Marilee Lindner, not until she was ready to leave on her terms.

All the teachers and friends and parents brought in enough food to feed an Army at the retirement party.

Someone had given her a headdress showing she was a retiree and she may have known more was going on, but when she was escorted to the cafeteria, a big smile came about her face as she glanced across the room packed with people, all there to wish her happy retirement.

Lindner has probably not been the “modern teacher” today and makes no apologies for it.

In fact, after two video presentations, the second one ended with Frank Sinatra singing his famous song, “I did it my way.”

Retirement party surprised teacher: This is how Marilee Lindner reacted as she entered the cafeteria of Sunshine Elementary School last Thursday when a big-time retirement party was given in her honor.

And that had to be Marilee’s song, too … “what’s more than this, I did it my way.”

It fit Marilee Lindner who taught her own way while it may not have pleased some higher-ups, but she stood her grounds and taught and her students went into first grade ready to start the next 12 years of their educational life well prepared.

She was teased for her “long emails” as people like Principal Winston Bishop said when he paid his tribute to her. He said the school had been lucky to have her as a kindergarten teacher and that she would be missed.

“We value you and what you brought to Sunshine Elementary,” he said.

One of the teachers at the school was a kindergarten student of Lindner’s. She is Lori McWhortetz, 23, and was taught by Lindner about 18 years ago.

Marilee Lindner

“She was a great teacher,” she remembered.

Marilee Lindner had snacks in her room for kids who did well and she had snacks in her room for the students that she came to know didn’t have enough food at home.

“You get to know your students when you are with them five days a week. You learn about their home life and sometimes it makes you sad, but you love them and help them along like you do all the others,” she said.

She was born in Lee County as Mary Lee Strayhorn in 1936, but her father was born here after her grandparents arrived from Kentucky in 1909, her husband said.

Fort Myers was a little cow town, he said, on the river and one day in the mid-1950s, they were returning from a hunting trip in the Everglades when he came down SR80 and pointed down the road and in a mocking voice commented, “Some guy from Chicago thinks he can build a town down there on Willie’s ranch. There’s nothin’ but palmettos and rattlers; it’s too far from the beach and it’ll never happen.”

Now the community known as Lehigh has a population of more than 87, 000 people and several elementary schools, two high schools and two middle schools.

After graduating from Ft. Myers High School in 1954, she headed for Nyack College in New York and on June 2, 1958, she turned in her graduation gown in the morning and replaced it with a wedding gown in the evening.

Fast forward to 1983. Facing their empty nest in a suburb of Chicago, her husband said they chose to leave the ice and snow and move to east Lee County where Marilee had grown up.

And here, in the former home of rattlers and palmettos, she resumed teaching, first Lehigh Elementary, then as her husband says, she moved over “to the new school” at Sunshine Elementary in the early 1980s.

And that’s where has been ever since.

Her husband likes to say Marilee is “graduating” again after years of preparing 5 and 6-year-olds to climb the educational pyramid from kindergarten to 12th grade.

“She’s graduating – that is retiring, from Sunshine School after 2 ½ decades of rewarding teaching,” he said.

As Lindner watched videos prepared by others at the school, many showing dozens of photos of her and her students over the years, she would wipe away a tear or two.

“I remember many, if not most of them, and a lot by their names,” she said.

All had good things to say about her as she was surrounded by people hugging her and wishing her well in the years to come. They were people like JJ Constantine, who prepared one of the videos and Dr. Linda Brown, the assistant principal, who helped to prepare the big party.

Also honored at the party was 90-year-old Charlotte Kelly who has spent several years at Sunshine as a volunteer. She was called an angel by all. Also mentioned during the presentation was another retiring teacher, Linda Stabenow, who was not present due to ill health.

Marilee Lindner said she was once told by a principal to stop “the fluff,” referring to the way she taught. But her basic teaching and love for the students caused her students to do well as they progressed through the school system.

Teaching her own way was the way it was and everyone knew it. Other kindergarten teachers at the school have watched Marilee Lindner as a model in the way to teach young children.

“I can say it now that I am retiring … just too many tests, tests, tests for the children. That is not the way it should be. Teachers should be teachers first and testers second,” she said.

She plans to travel some, her husband said. Marilee said first off, she plans to get her house in order.

“Like I’ve got to do with my classroom,” she laughed. “I’ll be here all next week for sure getting my classroom empty and in order, too.”