Look for her today near the brown ticket booth at Memorial Field.
She’ll be the one with the warm smile and stack of manila envelopes, 10 in all, each containing stuff you thought was gone forever.
If you were lucky enough to have had Leigh Walls as your kindergarten or first grade teacher at Dame School, you’ll be receiving those funny stick-figure drawings and misspelled words you created 12 years ago. Walls saved them specially for you, specially for your family, specially for this day, Concord High’s graduation.
It’s her annual tradition, held each June, and she’ll keep doing it until the last of her first-grade classes graduates eight years from now.
“If I had my way, each child who graduates from Concord High could get something that reminds them about those years,” Walls said Friday, sitting on her screened-in porch. “Even if one thing was kept in a file for every year of their life, what a gift that would be. Even as a parent, I don’t have everything that I should keep for my kids, so I think the parents appreciate it.”
They do. The ones whose children were in Walls’s class before she retired in 2011 couldn’t call me back quickly enough. They wanted to talk about the teacher with the unique style of paying tribute to her students, each one, each year.
Cyndi Christie, whose son Alex graduated last year, cried when she read the introductory letter written by Walls, the one telling her that she had saved things from Alex’s past and he should expect this surprising gift on graduation day.
“After graduation, there she was with her bag and all her brown manila envelopes,” Christie said. “I opened it up in the car and there were things Alex had done in first grade, practicing his writing skills and drawings and things he had glued together making pictures out of construction paper.”
So touched was Christie that she actually told the Monitor about Walls last year. She also alerted school district officials after Walls retired five years ago, looking to create an accolade-filled buzz.
“It’s such a touching story that someone would have so much love for what they do and love for children who are in their environment,” Christie said. “It’s not like school ends and you throw everything out and start again next year.”
Instead, with an eye toward the future, Walls makes copies of students’ work, and saves photos and drawings, essentially keeping a period of innocence alive while time zooms forward. She started doing it around 1989, meaning the first recipient was the class of 2001, give or take.
She stores the valuables in her basement, then spreads the material around her home, cutting and pasting and packaging with the precision of a surgeon and the care of a mother hen.
“She catches you as you’re walking out of the gate on a special date, when you were surrounded by family, and she presents you with a special package,” said Maria Rouvalis, Concord High Class of 2008, now in law school at Boston College. “It’s a special way to end an already special day, and it comes full circle on the day you’re finishing school.”
Nowadays, Walls doesn’t have the access to her former students like she had while still working, so Concord High guidance counselor Betsy Peabody hand delivers Walls’s personalized notes that tell them she’ll be waiting at the ticket booth, armed with her manila envelopes .
“It’s a very warm feeling when you know your first grade teacher has been watching you for all these years,” Peabody said. “It’s a feeling that this person has cared about me all this time.”
“For as long as I can remember, she goes to graduation at Concord High, whether it’s 100 degrees or pouring rain,” added Walls’s daughter, Allison Walls, 32. “She still has until 2024 until her last class finishes, and she will see it through to the end.”
Allison Wells teaches first grade in Laconia. She never thought she’d follow in her mom’s footsteps, saying “A lot of reluctance, because I saw how hard and long my mom worked, the time she put in, the dedication to students and being exhausted by time she got home. It was a little intimidating.”
But not only did Allison Walls, impacted by her mother, change her mind about her career, she felt compelled to contact me so I’d write about Leigh, who more than once stressed the story should not focus on her.
“It feels awkward for being singled out for this,” Leigh said. “I’m not the only teacher who keeps track of kids and notices when they do well academically. There are teachers I know who write notes and send cards.”
But maintain a running file on each student, containing work not even their parents kept? For more than a decade? Year after year?
“Leigh is maybe the most conscientious teacher I have ever met,” said Barbara Hemingway, a teacher at Concord’s Mill Brook School. “She takes a great deal of interest in all of her students and their lives.”
The tradition continues today.
One on the football field.
The other at the ticket booth.