The picture, sketched in pencil and colored in crayon, was given to Fredericka Cukjati six years ago.
“To Freddie. From Anthony,” reads the note from a second-grader to his school librarian and literacy teacher. “I lik the way that you put love in reding.”
At 71, Freddie — as everyone calls her — is a flaming redhead, hard-core hard-rocker and hockey fan with the Stanley Cup tattooed on her ankle. She can sustain the attention of the wiggliest first-grader. She can outwit the most wisecracking tween. And she can point out things you’ve never noticed in “The Giving Tree,” no matter how many times you may have read it. At the Kunsberg School, Freddie’s a legend.
“She’s the soul of this place,” says Rosa Hobbs, whose three kids were educated there.
The school, part of National Jewish Health Medical and Research Center, serves 83 kids with respiratory problems and other chronic diseases. For many of them, poverty, learning disabilities and trauma can be as challenging as their illnesses.
Freddie retired Friday after running the library and teaching reading there for 30 years. She worked at other schools for two decades, meaning she has spent half a century as an educator.
The length of her career is extraordinary. But how she works — putting love into it, as Anthony Cooper wrote — is even more impressive.
Freddie stands each morning in front of the hospital, greeting students who come with asthma, sickle cell and all manner of other diseases. Some days, they arrive tired. Or hungry. Or feeling rotten.
She smiles as she zips their jackets for their walk through the hospital campus. She lets them know she’s glad they made it that morning. She hugs them like she means it.
Her desk sits in the middle of Kunsberg’s library, which sits in the middle of the school. The shelves are lined, Dewey Decimaled and dusted for kids with allergies. They hold books on any subject that kids dream about or want to learn.
Anthony, now an eighth- grader, remembers dreading school until he found comfort in the library in second grade. He didn’t know who he was, he says, until Freddie bombarded him with vocabulary words and early readers and taught him to figure stuff out for himself.
“She knows you. She reads you. And she finds a book for you,” he said last week before graduating from Kunsberg. “Freddie and this library, they’re foundations for me.”
Much has been written lately about teachers who get run down, fried.
“Teachers burn out,” says Stan Krautman, a retired math teacher who volunteers every Tuesday in Kunsberg’s library. “But not Freddie. She just got better.”
It’s tough not to sit in her reading class and imagine what these students will become partly because of her. It’s hard not to wonder what we grown-ups would have learned if there had been more Freddies and more libraries like hers along the way. It’s impossible not to be inspired by a great teacher, her half-century of giving, yet ache for Kunsberg as she packed up her lesson plans and walked out the door Friday.
Anthony’s picture, now framed, will get a permanent place on her living-room wall.
“This,” she says, pressing it to her chest. “This picture — well, this is worth 50 years right here.”
Susan Greene writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-1989 or greene@denverpost.com.
