BROOKLINE — “I'm just drawn to kids, I guess,” says Cynthia Nau, who serves as librarian in the Brookline, Townshend, and Windham Elementary Schools in the West River Valley.
“It all started when I was 13,” Nau, 76, recalls, chuckling. “I went to help out a new mom in the neighborhood. She handed me the baby and took off with her older children for the day.”
Undaunted, Nau rose to the challenge and has been caring for and educating young children ever since. Most famously, she started the Farm in the Dell preschool and kindergarten at her home in Brookline, which she ran for 17 years.
There was already a tradition of private kindergarten in the West River Valley in the late 1950s. Nau substituted in the established class, then held in the parsonage of the Newfane Church, when teachers left for maternity leave.
Eventually, she took over the class before opening her school at her farm in Brookline. For 17 years, Nau ran her private kindergarten, where enrollment sometimes reached 25.
This was all in addition to raising her own children and helping her husband, Courtney, run their dairy farm.
With typical understatement, Nau says, “They were busy years.”
Busy, but happy.
Cynthia and Courtney met in Stamford, Conn., when they were both in seventh grade. She left junior college to work and help care for Courtney, who spent 17 months hospitalized with tuberculosis.
When he recovered, they made their move to southern Vermont, which they knew from summers spent in Wardsboro, where Courtney's family had a summer place. They married in 1953 and bought the farm in 1955.
At first, the class ran for a half day, and Nau would patch together a full-time job by teaching half a day in either Brattleboro or Townshend as well.
For years, she ran the school first in one room of their house, later expanding to two. Meanwhile, her husband ran the farm.
Farm memories
The couple left their mark on the kindergarten's graduates.
Scott Brooks, who attended the Farm in the Dell, says, “I can't remember from 40 years ago.” But Brooks does remember that Courtney Nau came up to visit every day. “We called him 'The Principal',” Nau says. “The farm made great field trips.”
Elaine Meyer, of Townshend, remembers driving a carload of kids down to Brookline every day.
“You couldn't do it today,” she explains, “but we'd put two kids in the front seat, four in the middle, three in the third seat, and two or three in the space behind the last seat and the gate. When we got there and opened the doors, 11 or 12 kids would pour out of the car, like in the circus!”
Meyer, mother of six, says the experience was “good for them to get to know other kids. They learned ABCs and counting. It was a good experience.”
Scott Brooks agrees; he sent his own kids to Little Valley Nursery School in Townshend.
“It's definitely worthwhile,” he says, explaining that his three kids started going three days a week the first year, then five days a week before starting kindergarten. “It gets them used to going to school, and eases them in to it.”
Indeed, the importance of early education is now widely recognized.
Staff at the Vermont Board of Education are uncertain, but think that universal kindergarten was mandated throughout Vermont about 1969. Once the state started setting and enforcing standards, it became more difficult for Nau to keep her school open.
“I could take the kids on a field trip to visit a farm 20 miles away,” she said, shaking her head, “but we weren't allowed to take them down to the farm on the premises.”
“They tried to close me down,” Nau says. “They gave me a violation for having the woodstove unfenced - in July! Never once did they ever look at my curriculum.”
In addition to more regulations and more enforcement, Nau explains that more kids arrived from single-parent homes.
“Many dads were absent,” she remembers, “so Courtney would take kids down to the farm. But we were cited for operating out of the designated playground.” By 1979, Nau closed the school.
About the same time, the Naus were facing difficulties typical to dairy farmers. They had increased the size of their herd in an attempt to stay afloat. “But bigger wasn't better,” Nau says. “We sold out.”
Back to school
For eight years, she drove a school bus for West River Transportation, her husband's new venture. She also started taking courses at the Community College of Vermont, earning her associate's degree in early childhood education, then completing her bachelor's through Johnson State's external degree program in library media and liberal arts in 1991.
After a stint as librarian at the Moore Free Library in Newfane, Nau became a school librarian. “She just loves kids, loves learning, loves books!” says Julie Dolan, who teaches fifth grade at Townshend Elementary School.
“She's wonderful with the kids,” says Sally Newton, classroom teacher at the tiny Windham Elementary School. “She really supports our little school.”
Dolan adds, “She moves with the times and incorporates technology into the curriculum.”
Nau uses technology to promote reading. “I have kids read and listen along to a book on the computer, then check the book out [of the library], which is good,” says Nau.
On the other hand, Nau worries about her 2-year-old great-grandson, who watches movies all day long and on long drives.
Those movies serve as his bedtime stories, “and it doesn't take the place of mom reading to him,” she says. “You need to take time to listen to your child, to listen to what they have to say.”
On the subject of nurturing mental development in children, Nau becomes passionate.
“Now we know you have to start reading to kids in utero and when they're newborns,” she says. “That's hard. When we were farming, I didn't do the reading with my own children that I advocate today.”
Nau uses her position as school librarian to instill a passion for reading and problem solving. She's also continuing her own education, currently taking on-line classes towards a master's in brain-based learning.
“Why?” she asks. “What am I going to do with it at my age?”
She answers her own question. “I'm fulfilling a goal I set for myself, she explains. “There were a couple of questions that stuck in my mind from when I was getting my associate's degree. Theories of brain development. Now I'm interested in differentiated learning. It's really good,” she says.
Now teaching the children of the children she taught back in nursery school, Cynthia Nau continues to be the West River Valley's model for the value of lifelong learning, starting young.
And not ever stopping.