Vincent Elementary teacher gets 'funky' goodbye from former students

LORAIN — After more than 20 years with the district, a Clearview teacher got a musical send-off from some of her former students. Ann Stambol has spent the past 34 years teaching elementary and middle school students, 28 of those at Clearview Schools, and fifth graders Samantha Kahnert, Suniya Casteel, Cassidy Edwards and Bridget Smith surprised Stambol during her virtual class Wednesday. The girls had Stambol for class last year before moving up to Durling Middle School. After hearing she was retiring this school year, the group got together to make a slide show, speeches and a performance of Steve Martin's "King Tut" from a 1978 Saturday Night Live skit. "Every time I would teach a story, it would make me think of a song," Stambol said of how third and fourth graders learned the Steve Martin single. "So I have a YouTube channel that I just collect playlists of songs. So they've had to go through all these songs that I had connected to every story. So like when we did a story about King Tut I had to bring out the Steve Martin 'King Tut' song — they were obsessed with that." Stambol's last assignment at Vincent Elementary was gifted classes to third- and fourth-graders, but over the past three decades she's rotated between math, science, English and other itinerants for children in third through sixth grades. The girls coordinated Stambol's surprise retirement party with help from Vincent Elementary staff. Fellow staff members kept her out of the room while the girls brought in balloons, cake and a photo slideshow to play on the SmartBoard behind them. Stambol has been cleaning out her classroom, giving things to former students and fellow teachers until she's condensed decades into about five boxes. Once the dust settles from Stambol's last day teaching, she plans to work part-time as a computer integration specialist, putting her master's in computer science to use — a degree that made the past year-and-a-half of virtual school a little easier. She said she's always going to keep checking up on former students and is interested in seeing where they go in life and helping connect them to resources wherever she can. She's already helped Samantha, Suniya, Cassidy and Bridget get into a summer theater program, and one of them into an online writing workshop. It's something her former choir teacher at Elyria Catholic has done for her. "It was funny last night when I put some retirement stuff on Facebook, one of my teachers commented and I said 'Boy I felt old when I started getting my students' kids kids here, you must feel really old when one of your students retires,'" she said, laughing. "I would too though." She added later, "I just enjoy seeing how well they're doing, and I've enjoyed working here. I've made a lot of memories." Contact Carissa Woytach at (440) 329-7245 or cwoytach@chroniclet.com.