Colleen Ferris-Kimball, who retired at the end of the 2024-25 school year, fondly looks back at the three decades she spent in the education field and helping countless students along the way.

Not only was Ferris-Kimball the original Greenery teacher at Newtown High School, she also developed and ran the school’s FLEX program years later.

The FLEX program prevents academic failure through early intervention and provides a safe and challenging environment where students can achieve academic success.

Students are referred to the program based on input from school counselors, teachers, and administrators regarding individual student performance, attendance, and other non-academic concerns. Placements can be temporary or long-term, based on the individual needs of the student.

Ferris-Kimball developed the program alongside special education teacher Cate Brainard over the summer in 2005.

Brainard’s certification was in special education and English, while Ferris-Kimball’s was in social studies.

Ferris-Kimball and Brainard started each year with around 25 kids, and the number of students would grow as the year went on. At first, they each taught small classes of 5-6 students while doing case management. However, Ferris-Kimball said it got to be too much too between teaching and meeting with students for case management.

“So eventually, we didn’t have to teach those small classes, and then we added on a math teacher down the road,” Ferris-Kimball said.

The most important piece of FLEX, she said, was case management. They would contact teachers — initially with paper since they did not have PowerSchool yet — and see which students needed help.

Ferris-Kimball said some students had difficult things in their lives and it was hard for them to be present in class. Rather than them staying at home and missing a whole day of school, they would get these students into FLEX, provide instruction as needed, and make sure they were caught up with their work.

“Because what happens if they miss multiple days is that they just get farther and farther behind, and then it just spirals out of control,” Ferris-Kimball explained.

She said they frequently worked with the principal and pupil personnel services and came up with strategies and interventions to help students be successful.

The program started differently compared to when Ferris-Kimball retired. It primarily had kids who did not succeed in the classroom for various reasons, but now predominately has kids with anxiety.

“There were years where we had to sit before the Board of Education, explain our program, and fight for us to stay in the budget,” Ferris-Kimball said. “But I think everyone now really sees the value in it. We’ve helped so many kids.”

A Drive For Teaching

Ferris-Kimball knew she wanted to be a teacher for many years, but especially knew she wanted to teach agriculture. She went to Nonnewaug High School in Woodbury, which has a vocational agricultural program. As part of the program, Ferris-Kimball said students joined Future Farmers of America, now known as FFA.

She participated in a lot of activities through FFA, going to leadership workshops, traveling to FFA’s National Convention in Kansas City, and working with the younger leaders in the various other chapters throughout Connecticut.

She credits that passion of teaching to a few great teachers she had in high school, specifically history teacher Mark Linehan, who helped fuel her interest in history, and agriculture mechanics instructor Alex Thomson, who drove her to different FFA leadership activities.

However, Ferris-Kimball knew if she wanted to teach agriculture, she would need to go to UConn to specialize in it.

“But I kind of got cold feet at the last minute,” Ferris-Kimball explained. “I didn’t want to leave home and I just started dating my boyfriend … so my mom encouraged me to go to WestConn, and I ended up becoming a social studies teacher.”

In 1988, Ferris-Kimball got her bachelor’s degree in history and got married two weeks later. That same year, she took a job at Hawley Elementary School as a paraprofessional for a first grade classroom, just to try out teaching. Another reason teaching appealed to her, she said, is that she would have summers off to help her family run Ferris Acres Creamery.

Ferris-Kimball started the following summer at Fairfield University. This came at the suggestion of one of her professors, who told her about a certification program the university had: students could get their credits towards certification, and also have it go towards a master’s degree in teaching and foundation.

By the time she received her teaching certification in 1990, Ferris-Kimball was pregnant with her daughter.

“I just couldn’t imagine getting a job with a new baby, so I just stopped looking for a job at that point,” Ferris-Kimball said.

A Blooming Career

When her daughter was nine months old, Ferris-Kimball was approached by Mary Lou Huisking, who ran the work experience program at Newtown High School.

She came to Ferris-Kimball with a job offer: help run a new Greenery program at the high school. Huisking had gotten a Juran grant, which paid for the purchase and construction of a greenhouse, along with Ferris-Kimball’s salary.

Ferris-Kimball, Huisking, and fellow teacher Martha Wilson split the work experience class into three. Ferris-Kimball would take one section down to the greenhouse, Wilson led another section for a video class, and Huisking kept the last third for resume writing and business education.

Together with the Greenery students, Ferris-Kimball said they bought seedlings and propagated, designed, and sold decorative baskets.

Ferris-Kimball’s daughter used to come with her to the greenhouse and learned to walk in front of the students.

“I had a little swing in the greenhouse and she’d sit in the swing, and some of those kids would just pick her up,” Ferris-Kimball said. “They gave me the best baby shower, those kids.”

All these years later, Ferris-Kimball remembers the big grand opening they had to celebrate the greenhouse. Students suggested names for the business, and they landed on two choices: Newtown Greenery and A Blooming Business.

“So we did Newtown Greenery — A Blooming Business,” Ferris-Kimball said with a smile. “I still have a business card with my name on it.”

Unconventional Experiences

She went on to teach Greenery for three years, but that was far from her last teaching position. Ferris-Kimball said she always seemed to end up in “non-traditional teaching experiences.”

“And that kind of fit with me because I sort of had a non-traditional background. There weren’t too many farmers,” Ferris-Kimball said. “It enabled me to keep that sort of uniqueness.”

Many students in her greenhouse classes, she said, were seen as “the throwaway kids.” NHS had recently shut down woodshop and metal shop and had only just started the culinary program, according to Ferris-Kimball.

“There were some kids that just needed a space, for kids who weren’t as academically inclined or whose strengths weren’t necessarily in the classroom,” Ferris-Kimball explained. “Unless they were in auto, there really wasn’t a space for them.”

Ferris-Kimball worked with some of those students through Greenery and made it a welcoming space for them. In the last of her three years of teaching Greenery, Ferris-Kimball found out she was pregnant with twins and decided to stop teaching.

“It didn’t occur to me to go on maternity leave at the time, so I just continued to help out my family on the farm instead,” she explained.

Ferris-Kimball took a couple years off to finish her grad work before becoming a homebound tutor at the request of former NHS Assistant Principal Jules Triber. Her mother-in-law helped with the kids, and so for several years, Ferris-Kimball did four hours of homebound tutoring three times a week.

“It was a little bit of money, but it still got me connected with the school,” Ferris-Kimball said.

The district later centralized tutoring and homebound tutoring into one tutoring program at Fairfield Hills. Ferris-Kimball taught on one end of an office building, while Carlos Skolas and Mary Ann Snieckus taught the district’s alternative program on the other end.

Whenever Ferris-Kimball’s students needed some science work, Snieckus would come over, work with students, and lead them in activities like shark dissections. Ferris-Kimball would go over and teach US history to the alternative program students.

While the students could be difficult to teach at times, Ferris-Kimball said she wanted to do whatever she could to guide them.

“It’s that work ethic that was ingrained in me. It’s like, you work hard, you do your best, and you make it work,” Ferris-Kimball said. “So I was determined to make it work, and I did the best I could.”

Ferris-Kimball eventually got moved to the basement of Newtown High School, when then-principal Pat Llodra called her into the office and told her about FLEX.

Entering Retirement

Looking back at her years of teaching, Ferris-Kimball said her favorite part was getting to know the kids. Students would text if they were having a tough time with an assignment, and Ferris-Kimball would encourage them to come into FLEX so they could come up with a solution together.

She also said she is deeply grateful to Lisa Sheridan, a mathematics teacher who worked with her in FLEX for 17 years.

With the help of her and her pupil personnel friends, Ferris-Kimball said she became more skilled in talking to kids that feel discouraged and hopeless. She tried to get them to understand that, as difficult as life can be, it can also be really good, too.

“Like I tried to encourage them to do their best, to keep their chin up, to get through the day and support the hell out of them,” Ferris-Kimball said. “Because they needed that social emotional support.”

Now entering retirement, Ferris-Kimball wants to spend more time with her family at the creamery.

“I just felt like it was time for a change,” she explained. “I wanted to leave when I was still happy teaching, when I still felt good about it.”

While it felt like the right time to retire, it was a hard decision to make. Ferris-Kimball teared up when thinking about her last days at school and saying goodbye to all her friends and colleagues. Nevertheless, she hopes to stay in touch with her peers and some of her students going forward.

Ferris-Kimball was honored at the 2024-25 BOE Profiles in Professionalism ceremony earlier this year. She was nominated by NHS Principal Kimberly Longobucco and NHS Assistant Principal David Roach, who said Ferris-Kimball is known for her spirited advocacy, always putting students first, and approaching work with compassion and tenacity.

Her retirement, they said, “will leave a space that is deeply felt.”

Reporter Jenna Visca can be reached at jenna@thebee.com.