From Liz Bourne, Westminster Schools Librarian

I met Claire first as a colleague. I moved to Westminster almost simultaneously with becoming our town’s first trained school librarian. We lived at the top of Patch Rd, straddling that invisible divide between West and East parishes. Starting out, I barely knew about this distinction, or that there were two schools in town, each with its own library, both now in my care.

Claire was the first of my Westminster colleagues to understand how libraries and librarians, information and its organization, support education…. this from a teacher of 6 – 8 year-olds! Claire was the first classroom teacher to specifically invite me to attend a PTA meeting to talk with parents about helping kids gather and sort information, and then share the cool stuff discovered. This was not because of her love of all things bookish, but because she taught as a curious learner herself.

Around this time, I became a member of Claire’s closer family – the parents. My Molly, like those illustrious alumni heard yesterday [referring to comments by students at the memorial celebration], has traveled, collaborated, advised, learned, and grown into a self-confident, independent adult, with so many thanks to her beginnings in Claire’s intellectual incubator.

I also see Claire as the heart of this community in whose very center I live now, even though I moved here after the Oglesbys retired to Brattleboro. I love living in the village center of Westminster West. But West West is more than a cluster of houses. For decades, Claire embodied this community’s ethos, serving as its cheerleader and outreach coordinator.

All of which brings me back to Claire and diversity. In Vermont, diversity has less to do with skin color or nationality than culture. The 3,000 inhabitants of Westminster look more or less the same, but we personify some of the most significant economic, social and cultural differences among people. Thank you Zack Aldrich, for talking yesterday [at the memorial gathering] about the sailors you now work with, and how your beginnings in Claire’s classroom inform your conversations with them now.

There were and are differences between Claire’s classroom and Mary’s, between Mary’s classroom and the Center School, between the Westminster Schools and whatever comes after. Each represents a wider world of difference. I feel our children grew in understanding and stature as they navigated from one to the next.

In that light, I encourage all to visit the Westminster Schools’ website http://wnesuwc.learningnetworks.com where Claire’s teaching peers honor her legacy. This tribute is now on our home page; it will become a link from the West School page http://wnesuwc.learningnetworks.com/pages/WNESU_WCSClasspages/wswest/Index