Zebell seeks school board
Published 8:45 am Thursday, April 28, 2011
Claudia Zebell, best known as a “professional volunteer” while raising her family, would bring to the Dowagiac Board of Education not only 16 years as a teacher, but an empathetic writing instructor “who hated writing in high school.”
Zebell, whose family will be building a school for a month in Zambia this summer, has lived in Dowagiac for 11 years after 16 years in Chicago.
She lives on Leach Road in Silver Creek Township.
Her husband also teaches, music in Hartford.
They met through a singing team.
“You can only learn writing by writing,” she said Wednesday. “I think it’s important that there be educators on school board,” said the vice president of Band Boosters and an Athletic Booster who has been serving on the community committee for The Disney Way initiative.
“I know how difficult a job teaching is,” she said, “and I have a heart for the students. I understand the challenge of trying to engage them. If someone’s asleep in my class, I need to change what I’m doing,” just like “when the Department of Corrections is getting an increase and educators are getting a decrease, we need the whole community to contact our legislators in Lansing.”
Her three children attended Sister Lakes Elementary School. Her oldest son, Blake, graduated two years ago. Craig is a junior. Anne is in seventh grade.
Ronda Sullivan is seeking the other four-year seat on the Dowagiac Board of Education in the Tuesday, May 3, election.
Incumbents Randy Cuthbert and Sherry File did not seek re-election.
Zebell grew up the oldest of four children in Bergen County, N.J., just outside New York City.
She attended Columbia University and student taught in the Bronx.
“I wanted to be a guidance counselor,” she said, “but when I started teaching, I loved the students in the Bronx and wanted to keep teaching, which meant I had to get a master’s degree within five years, so I went right on to grad school. It was the same kind of era that it is now, where everyone said I wouldn’t get a teaching job without moving to Texas, but I had a sense I would get hired.”
In fact, her teaching job took her to an affluent community in northern New Jersey that was “a real contrast” to her impoverished students in the Bronx.
It was a part-time position, but became fulltime two weeks after others passed on the job teaching high school English.
When an opportunity opened up in Chicagoland, “I actually got hired to teach English over a Ph.D. because the writing training I got at the State University of New York was something the school in Illinois wanted. It’s one of God’s jokes on me because I hated writing in high school” and dreaded when assigned papers came due.
“That’s why I have a heart for students, because I struggled with writing so much myself.”
While Dowagiac was a bit of culture shock after her urban-oriented resume, Zebell champions “this incredible, humble town” which attracts great literary figures to the Dogwood Fine Arts Festival.
“We frequently have visitors and I drive them around and say, ‘Look at the incredible sculptures.’ ”
Zebell’s own father dropped out of high school who later graduated first in his college class. She ranked near the top of her high school class.
Before he passed away, her dad worked in refugee camps in Malawi. “He was a latchkey kid in an era when such children didn’t exist,” she said. “He had a fine mind, taught math, was a computer programmer and wanted us to have Ph.Ds., but he never talked about what turned him around or why he was not engaged.
“My mom was a nurse, but my dad wanted her home with us when we came home from school. No one was home for him, so he went to the theater after school. The black-and-white world was more real to him than real life. When asked to write down people who influenced his life, he chose characters from novels.”
Her brother married a teacher who was twice the top educator in Connecticut. Her youngest sister followed their mom into nursing.
Not only was her mom there, checking assignments, “She used to make me rewrite thank-you notes, which helped me become an editor,” while her dad instilled a love of literature reading aloud from The Iliad and The Odyssey.