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Finding comfort in Carol's Corner
By MELIA BOWIE, Times Staff Writer
HUNTER'S GREEN -- Over the years teacher Carol Woodson guided innumerable first-graders as they read their first words and wrote their first sentences. When she was diagnosed with cancer in December 2000 she was still there; wearing hats to cover the effects of chemotherapy until her departure and later her death in February at age 53. Now, with a new reading room dedicated to her memory, Woodson's family, friends and co-workers at Hunter's Green Elementary are bringing Woodson back into the lives of New Tampa's children. "We have a room in the media center with the walls hand-painted like a storybook scene and it's going to be a reading room called Carol's Corner ... to preserve her memory," said Hunter's Green principal Donna Ares. The room was completed last month but has not yet been dedicated. "I cried when I saw it," said friend and fellow first-grade teacher Pam Taylor. "She would have loved it. "In her place she had a little patio outside and it was just like a little arboretum. That's what this is. It is done with just beautiful, beautiful artwork." The idea for Carol's Corner came not long after her death. "We wanted to do something," said Taylor. Initially, the faculty discussed naming a new covered playground after her. Community members later lobbied for a new elementary school in Heritage Isles to bear her name. Perhaps a planting, they thought, "that would be life in the wake of her death but what she really loved to do was read," Taylor said. Woodson began teaching at Hunter's Green 10 years ago when it opened. "She helped found the school," Ares said. Before that she taught at Tampa Palms Elementary, educating more than 700 students during her 23-year career and keeping track of many of them. She completed Relay for Life walks while battling small cell lung cancer, a rare form of the disease that had accounted for about 35,000 of the nation's 161,000 lung cancer cases when she was diagnosed. "The kids, they go on," said Taylor. "It's the rest of us who have emotional ties." Although a sense of melancholy remains, coworkers are now able to focus on Woodson's legacy. "They're realizing she was a vital part of the school," Ares said. "And they're remembering her, honoring her ... keeping her alive."
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From the Times Letters |
