Innovative Austin schoolteacher persevered to keep her job

From gym classes to proms, the solid maple gym floor served Austin High School well from 1921 to 1993. When a new library replaced the 72-year-old gym in '93, its floor boards were salvaged, stripped of old finish and turned into recognition plaques for what's now called the Floor on the Wall.

One of the 992 plaques honors the late Edith Morey, an embattled Austin elementary school teacher in the 1960s who was both beloved by students and parents but reviled by Austin's school board. In a five-year legal battle, the board unsuccessfully took its case to fire Morey to the Minnesota Supreme Court three times.

School officials insisted Morey's mental health was among the reasons justifying their attempt to can her. State Supreme Court Chief Justice Oscar Knutson vehemently disagreed. He lambasted the school board for staging its hearings about her mental health in the school auditorium packed with an estimated 1,000 bystanders in March 1962.

"We are convinced that the so-called hearing involved in this case did not follow even minimum rules of fair play," Knutson scolded in his majority opinion in 1967. "… What evidence there is to substantiate any of the charges is so polluted by gossip, hearsay, and rumor … that it is impossible to determine whether the board based its findings, such as they are, on probative evidence … if, in fact, it considered the evidence at all."

Morey was 36, her hair already graying, during four days of hearings as the school board made its vague allegations about her emotional problems, poor teaching methods, disruptive staff relationships and mental health issues.

It's hard to imagine a termination hearing today with mental health issues at its crux being conducted in a crowded public auditorium. But this was more than 50 years ago. Four mothers testified in gushing terms in 1962 about how Morey drew students out and made them "bloom."

"You nearly approach the genius level and your present trouble stems from professional jealously," one mother told the board.

So they fired her. And when courts tried to reinstate her, the school board would take its case back to the Supreme Court.

"The case must come to an end sometime," Knutson, the flummoxed chief justice, fumed in 1967.

Finally, after five years, a lower court judge ordered the Austin school district to give Morey $35,000 in back pay. But she was fired again in 1970 for "insubordination, conduct unbecoming a teacher and willful neglect of duty."

Mike Ruzek, a 71-year-old retired insurance agent who graduated from Austin High School in 1964, was the chairman of the alumni group that put up the Floor on the Wall.

"A lot of people thought she was treated unfairly and the school board just wouldn't let it go," Ruzek said. "She was an eccentric person, but intelligent, innovative and ahead of her time and she was bucking the way teachers were supposed to do things."

She had no children of her own and outlived her siblings. By the time she died at the Good Samaritan Center in Austin in 2013, at 87, the controversial educator might not have realized how appreciative her former students were. Her mind was slipping.

But a "long overdue" thank-you letter from Mike House was framed on her wall in the senior building. Morey was House's fourth-grade teacher in 1956, and he and Ruzek presented the letter to her 55 years later in 2011.

"Certainly this teacher was unconventional in her methods and perhaps well ahead of her time," wrote House, who now lives in South Carolina and paid the $250 for Morey's plaque. "In today's terminology, she was teaching us how to think, feel and interact as opposed to merely teaching us how to learn."

House's letter described how "each day I would start for school with eagerness wondering what new adventure awaited me." He was among 28  9-year-olds and Morey found "the best in each student" and brought it out whether it was "a musical talent, a gift for rhyme, a woodworking skill, a physical skill or a grasp of numbers or words.

"She made sure everyone in the class recognized the special attribute of their classmate," House wrote, reflecting back more than five decades later about how Morey raised children's self-esteem by "making them feel better about themselves."

"Unfortunately, for reasons beyond my scope of my understanding, things did not always go smoothly for her," House wrote. "She was, to my knowledge, never acclaimed for the positive impact she had on the lives of so many of her students."

House's letter, which was read and distributed at her funeral in 2013, ended with this:

"I wish that she might know she has my continuing gratitude and holds a special place within my memory for the lessons and examples that have stayed with me my entire life. I say, for myself and many others — Bless you Edith Morey for a job well done."