Kent teaching tandem retires after 44 years

For the past 44 years, Carol Calbom and Susan Stroomer have taught together in the Kent School District, including job sharing for 25 years.

Now the pair is moving on to retirement together.

They met in 1971 as first-year teachers at Cedar Valley Elementary in Covington. The school was an open concept, with six classes in a large room with no walls.

“Within three days we just clung to each other because we were the first-year teachers in that bay and we became instant friends,” Calbom said. “There was no wall. There was nothing, so you get to know each other very well, very quickly.”

Stroomer, 68, grew up in Kent, having attended Meridian elementary and junior high and Kent-Meridian High School before earning her teaching degree from the University of Puget Sound.

“I ended up (working) in Kent because I still lived in Kent,” Stroomer said, “plus the Kent School District was very desirable to get a job. It had a great reputation.”

Calbom, 66, grew up in Longview and attended Northwest Nazarene College in Idaho. She applied to 76 school districts while looking for her first teaching job.

“It was very hard to get a job back then,” Calbom said.

After several years at Cedar Valley, Calbom transferred to Spring Glen Elementary in Renton, which was leased by the Kent School District to provide classroom space while new schools were built.

“I called up Susan and said, ‘Do you want to try to job share?'” Calbom said. “So we got our principals together and the district people, and they OK’d it.”

Both women had started families and wanted to spend time with their children.

“It was just fabulous,” Calbom said. “We considered it the best of both worlds because we got to be moms and still have a career.”

Each teacher worked part time, Calbom working Monday and Tuesday, Stroomer working Thursday and Friday and alternating who taught Wednesdays.

Neither teacher expected their job sharing to last as long and as successfully as it did.

“The one thing that has helped us lot in our job is being a real team and being a ‘we,'” Stroomer said. “If I think up something, it is not my idea or she thinks something up, it is not her idea. It is our idea, because we work on those things and build them together.”

“There were other job share teams that haven’t had as much success, because they just had to have ownership,” Calbom added.

The two worked well together, with similar teaching styles, organizational skills and philosophies.

“We’ve had principals say if they had their eyes closed, they wouldn’t know which one they were observing,” Calbom said. “I would fill in her sentences and she would fill in mine, and in the beginning I planned her lessons and she planned mine and then it gradually started just mushing all together.”

The two are often mistaken for one another.

“People call me Mrs. Stroomer,” Calbom said. “They call her Mrs. Calbom.”

“I had a student call me at home once and ask for Carol Stroomer,” Stroomer recalled. “Even the staff got our names mixed up. I just answered to whichever.”

Calbom said job sharing motivated her to be the best teacher she could be.

“It made you stay on your toes because you never wanted the kids to like her (Stroomer) more than you, and so you didn’t get real crabby all the time,” she said.

When Ridgewood Elementary opened in Fairwood in 1986, the pair moved to the new school and has worked their until their retirement this month. They taught a variety of grades from kindergarten through third grade, most recently second grade.

When their own children were grown, they decided to go back to teaching full time, but still worked as a team, with Calbom focusing on language arts and Stroomer teaching math.

Their classrooms were side by side, and the students moved between the rooms.

“We wanted to get a hole in the wall but they (the school district) wouldn’t let us,” Calbom said.

Their students saw them both as their teachers, and the annual class pictures were taken with both classes together.

“We felt like that was a really great way for us to meet the needs of our kids and also for them to have opportunities to have more than just their little friendships in their classroom,” Stroomer said. “They see themselves as Calbom/Stroomer class, not Mrs. Stroomer’s class going to Mrs. Calbom and vice versa.”

Both teachers said they thought now was the right time to retire.

“We had a fabulous class this year,” Calbom said. “We ended on a high, high note.”

The pair had decided they would retire together.

Stroomer said after spending so much time working as a team it would be hard to work without the other.

“I have taught all the math and my room is set up for the mathematics and her room was set up for reading,” she said. “To be perfectly honest, I didn’t want to do both of those things.”

Although both women look forward to retirement, neither has big plans.

“You see yourself as a teacher and that is part of your identity, and I’m sure I will always be a teacher but not in a formal way anymore,” Stroomer said. “So that is something that is going to be a big adjustment.”

The pair said they plan to get together, even though Stroomer lives in Kent and Calbom lives in Seattle.

“Our friendship is not going to end,” Stroomer said. “Now we have grandchildren. Our children know each other quiet well, so our grandchildren are going to get to know each other.”

Stroomer, who is widowed, has three children and four grandchildren. Calbom and her husband, Hal, have two children, one grandchild and another due in December.