“I have a very long High Meadow story,” Marissa Ender says, laughing. First as a student, then as a teacher, she’s spent close to 20 years on campus, and to this day, “Many of my very close friends still are friends I made at High Meadow.”
Marissa was a student at High Meadow in the mid-1990s, Kindergarten through 6th-grade graduation. Her brother preceded her and her sister followed, extending her connection to the school across the decade. (Her sister was part of the first class to go through 7th and 8th grades.) Her mother served as math teacher, “a die hard fan” of the CSMP math program used at school for many years.
After High Meadow, Marissa briefly attended 7th grade in New Paltz before winding up in the Rondout Valley district. “I had a great experience there,” she says. “I had teachers I really loved and respected who had a solid relationship with the High Meadow students coming in.” If they’d once been skeptical of the “hippy dippy” kids from HMS, “by the time I got to Rondout, they were seeing some really great learners out of High Meadow.”
Marissa started college at Northeastern University in Boston, studying Engineering. “While I enjoyed the science,” she says, “I’m not really a builder. I’m really low-tech. I’m speaking to you now on my basic phone.” But the program was very technology focused. “I wanted nothing to do with that,” she says, so she transferred to SUNY New Paltz to major in mathematics. “Looking at career options, I added the education piece.”
“That was really great because my community was here,” she says. She returned to working at Jack and Luna’s, a cafe in Stone Ridge in the building now occupied by Hash, as she had done during her time at Rondout. Marissa had gotten the job at Jack Luna’s after the owners, HMS parents, had heard her speak at an alumni event. “There’re so many ties to High Meadow [for me], it’s ridiculous.”
Her last year at Jack and Luna’s, her degree complete, Marissa became assistant teacher in the HMS pre-Kindergarten classroom led by Kathy Flannery. She took the job knowing that, the following year, a position would be opening up teaching 5th and 6th grade math and science.
“I had some really amazing years and some really hard years,” she says of her 8-year tenure teaching at HMS. “The first year teaching somewhere new is always hard,” plus, the school had stopped using the CSMP curriculum, and was experimenting with other options. That process ultimately led to a shift back to CSMP, in part due to Marissa’s facility in teaching it.
Also, “[it] was an interesting time for High Meadow in terms of its growth,” Marissa says. Having attended HMS with only a handful of students per class, as teacher, “I caught points where there were 18-20 person classes.” She found the larger classes made it harder to dive deeply into collaboration.
“When Covid hit, I feel like we did a pretty amazing job offering virtual schooling right out of the boat. I still have all these videos of at-home experiments. [But] Covid really took it out of everybody – globally.” The following school year, the hybrid model “was really, really hard,” and Marissa found herself feeling burnt out.
In the summer of 2021, as it came time for High Meadow to transition to a new head of school, Marissa decided, “I think it’s my time to walk away.” She found it tough to face some of the changes ahead, even though change is inevitable. “I could feel myself being like, ‘in my day’ – and not in a way that felt good. I still had really amazing ties to HMS educators like Doris [Gonzales] and Jackie [Katzen], but there was a shift of people I knew leaving,” and she took it as a sign to move on.
“Overall, I really believe in the magic at High Meadow and could see the magic at High Meadow. It has a sense of community and belonging.” She saw students come from other places “and feel safe and comfortable.” Sometimes, students coming from more coercive school environments “at first would think, ‘oh, I don’t have to do it? Then I won’t.’ Then they’d see others do it because they wanted to, and think, ‘maybe I want to.’”
Her first year away from HMS, Marissa worked as a tutor for a number of students who had begun homeschooling during the pandemic. “I thought that might be more of a long-term plan, tutoring and/or getting involved in the alternative co-op schools. I really enjoyed it, [but] the lack of stability was hard for me, financially.”
Marissa’s sister, a social worker at the Ulster BOCES Special Education Center, encouraged her to consider joining their team. She thought it could offer Marissa both rewarding work and benefits and a pension. Marissa applied as a teaching assistant, then pursued Special Education certification. She’s now teaching math in one of the high school programs, which has about 25 students.
“What’s worked for me with all three of [my teaching roles] is the openness you have as an educator.” At the Special Education Center, “it’s about community building, and [creating] support systems. I have a lot of freedom.” Marissa and her students do a lot of cooking, games, and “whatever gets them learning. In terms of teaching, I have a lot of power and creativity. My job is not just about their test scores. It’s more about helping them find the skills they can use to be successful in adulthood. It’s less about ‘can you do advanced algebra formulas?’, though we hope to get them there, too.”
Outside of work, Marissa lives happily with her partner in High Falls, and stays in close touch with friends from her High Meadow days. “It’s lovely to have the next generation with kids coming in,” she says. Her siblings live within ten minutes, and all in all, she’s happy to report that “everybody’s doing pretty great.”